Every tag is yellow

Walk down the cereal aisle of a large supermarket in Riyadh and count the bright tags.

Special offer. New. Best seller. Limited time. Two for one. Healthier recipe. Each one was added by someone with a good reason. Each one, on its own shelf, would catch the eye.

Together they catch nothing. The whole aisle is shouting, so the shopper hears it as one long noise and reaches for the box she bought last time.

A highlight is a comparison. It says this, more than the things around it. The moment everything carries the mark, the comparison collapses, and the mark stops meaning anything at all. Yellow becomes the colour of the shelf.

The same thing happens on a product page where every line has a badge, in an email where every sentence is underlined, in a menu where every dish is the house favourite, in a message from a friend where every word is in capitals. The writer felt emphatic. The reader felt nothing in particular.

It is tempting, because leaving something unmarked feels like admitting it is less important. Nobody wants their product to be the plain one. But plain is what makes the marked one visible. Restraint is not a loss of emphasis. It is the thing that creates it.

So the useful question is not what deserves to stand out. Almost everything does, to the person who made it. The useful question is what you are willing to leave quiet.

If the whole aisle is yellow, the aisle is just yellow.