I am reading Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS, and in it he encourages looking for Web design inspiration in places other than the Web: cereal boxes, newspapers, magazines, buildings, to name a few. (This is something I’ve done for some time now, but I’ve been making a more conscious effort of late, given his advice.)
This morning I picked up a tube of my wife’s facial scrub. I looked for anything interesting in the design on the front. Then I looked at the back, which contains, among other things, an ingredient list. I wasn’t scanning the ingredient list as much as my eyes just happened to fall on one word:
Saliva.
Saliva! They put saliva in facial scrub? I looked again.
Salvia.
Salvia officinalis (sage) leaf extract. Ah, helps to keep reading past the line break.