Tip: quicker cable recognition

If you have various nests of cables around the place you’re not unusual (USB anyone?). Organising your cable types, and keeping them organised, feels like a classic Sisyphean task.

One way to make things easier is to make your most important cables easier to recognise. Here’s a handy system I use.

What does this system do?

It marks cables so that I can:

• see easily where the cable ends are, even among a tangle of cables
• quickly identify cables at a glance (no need to pick them up and closely examine the ends)
• know what kind both ends of the cable are, just by seeing one end

The cable colour system

We put coloured tape at both ends of a cable. We use two width of tape: wide and thin.¹

Different colours represent cable end kind, for example:

Marking cables with same connector at both ends

Say you had a cable with USB C plugs at both ends: you mark this with wide green tape at both ends.

Marking cables with different connectors

Say you had a cable with USB micro plug at one end and USB A at the other: you mark the USB micro end with wide pink tape nearest the connector, then thin lime tape next to that.

At the other end (USB A) you do the reverse: wide lime tape nearest the plug, then thin pink tape next to that.

Alternatives to colour

A colour scheme wouldn’t suit everyone. If you have a colour vision deficiency, a scheme with different contrast patterns might be better. If you have a high degree of vision loss, perhaps textured material (but in this case, perhaps touching the plugs themselves is enough).

• Organisation
• Tip
• Cables