# One shelf, two different systems for keeping track > A typeset bottle and a jar labelled with a strip of tape sit on the same cabinet shelf — one container issued by a system, the other invented at home to cover a gap in it. August 22, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-medicine-cabinet-with-two-kinds-of-label A small mark, high on the left chest, the rest of the shirt left empty. An open cabinet shelf, two containers set side by side: one a printed bottle with a neat typeset label, the other a plain jar carrying a strip of tape in someone's own hand. One label was issued. The other one was invented, at home, because nothing pre-printed covered what it needed to say. ## What's actually on the shelf? Two containers, and two completely different ways of recording what's inside them. The bottle reads `NEUROLAX 5MG`. The jar beside it reads `FOR THE COUGH`, in biro on tape. One states a measured quantity of a named substance; the other states what it is for, in the words the household actually uses. Neither tells you anything the other does. The bottle on the left is typeset and banded, the kind of label a pharmacy issues — clean sans type, a printed edition of information somebody else prepared in advance. The jar beside it has no printed label at all, just a plain lid and a scrap of tape in handwriting, added by whoever filled it because there was no other way to mark what it held. ## Why put a printed label next to a handwritten one instead of showing just one system? Because a cabinet with only one kind of label would be describing an institution. This one is describing a household. A shelf of nothing but typeset bottles reads like a dispensary — everything accounted for, nothing left to guesswork. A shelf of nothing but handwritten tape reads like there's no system at all. Most real cabinets are neither: an official label for whatever came with one, and a handwritten one for whatever didn't, sitting on the same shelf because the shelf doesn't care which system a container came from. ## Why does the size of the print matter here specifically? Because a mark this small only works if it rewards someone actually looking closely at it, rather than being read from across a room. Printed high and small on the left chest, roughly badge-sized, with the rest of the shirt left empty, the design asks for the same attention a real cabinet shelf gets — a glance that has to get close enough to tell one label from the other. A design this size is a chest emblem, not a statement print, and [a mark that size has to be rendered crisply enough to hold up at close range](/stories/print-size-on-the-body), unlike the wide statement zone most chest prints are built to fill from a distance. ## Do I need permission to invent labels like these? No — an invented bottle and an invented note belong to no pharmacy and no patient. Nothing about either label refers to a real product, a real prescriber or a real person's actual regimen; the typeset name and the handwritten note are both made up for the drawing, the same way any invented signage on this site is. Treat both labels as graphic content — a contrast between two kinds of typography — rather than as information anybody should act on. That's also simply the more useful shirt: a real label copies somebody's actual medical record onto a chest, which nobody needs and which the invented version does without. ## How is this different from a shirt built around a pill schedule? A schedule tracks whether something got done. This shelf tracks who the label was written by. [A blister pack with days punched open in a row](/stories/the-blister-pack-with-days-on-it) is entirely one system, keeping one kind of record over one stretch of time. This design is about two systems meeting on the same shelf — an issued label next to an improvised one — which is closer to [the same contrast a hand-lettered note in someone else's margin makes against printed text](/stories/the-margin-note-in-a-borrowed-zine): official and personal, both true at once. ## Isn't a medicine shelf too ordinary, or too private, a thing to put on a shirt? Ordinary, yes, and that's the design's whole case for itself — private is the wearer's call, not a property of the subject. Some people would rather the mark stay small and easy to miss, which the badge size already does. Others would print it larger and let it start a conversation. Neither reading gets the object more right than the other; the size on offer here happens to suit the quiet version, and a bigger front print could just as easily suit the other one. ## Does it print well? Yes, and the contrast between the two label types is what needs to survive at small size. Black carries both containers' outlines and the printed bottle's type; one dull green fills the printed label's band and tints the handwritten tape a shade lighter, so the two are readable as different objects even at badge scale. Clean sans type on the printed sticker needs to stay crisp, since [detail below the weave's floor is what disappears first at small sizes](/stories/bold-shapes-survive-fabric) — the handwritten note can afford to look rougher; the printed one can't. Clinical white or another pale, even ground keeps both labels legible without the badge disappearing into the shirt. ## How do I get one made? Describe the shelf at [JustOG](/) — what's printed, and what's written on tape instead. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). One label typeset in advance. One written on tape because nothing else was going to say it.