I caught a cold at the very end of my Christmas vacation this year and ended up starting 2008 with a stuffy nose. As anyone who’s had a cold knows, you’re constantly blowing your nose. At home I had a box of blandly styled 7th Generation brand kleenex. I guess to be neutral I should say tissue paper, but everyone knows they call it kleenex…great branding and identity work will do that for you!

In any case, the box itself was standard length rectangle; a bland exterior. I think my purchasing motivation when I bought it was least expensive. On a separate occasion, I bought a box from Target that had a really great design on the outside…but I could write a whole post about great design found at Target…

So the 7th Generation brand didn’t leave much of an impression on me, and to be fair, that’s not the companies goal. Their thing is being environmentally friendly and to worry about dying their packaging or tissues would be against their motto.

However, at work, we have these square boxes of actual Kleenex brand kleenex and that is what gave me the inspiration to write this blog. You see, I had gone though the box in rapid fashion while I was ill, and as I got within striking distance of finishing the box, the tissues changed from white to beige.

At first, it didn’t register with me; I was sick, and all I cared about was having something handy. But then when the box went empty shortly after a light bulb went off in my head: The color change signified the nearing exhaustion of the tissue supply! So I paused and considered the fact that the manufacturers had needed to specifically dye a portion of their supply in order to place it at the bottom of the package in order to alert the user of the nearing scarcity.

It is the attention to detail, to good design, in this unlikely place that really made me appreciate their brand and left an impression on me. The moral? Good design, even the simplest of tweaks, sets itself apart from the rest and resonates with the user.