What's the coolest barcode?

[Tim Cooke]

Hi Oliver,

The last time I had dealings working with a barcode way back in the early naughties when I was temping in a distribution warehouse. I was so fed up typing in the same old thing into the data entry system that I decided to create myself a sheet of barcodes of the most common bits of text I had to enter. That allowed me to use the handheld scanner we used for scanning in the model and serial numbers off the units to save me typing. A small victory, but it was worth it.

Now, if you've managed to stay awake through my boring story about my employment as a youth, then perhaps you can answer me this:

What's the coolest use of a barcode that you've ever seen?

Cheers, Tim

[Guillermo Ishi]

Tim Cooke wrote:
What's the coolest use of a barcode that you've ever seen?
Cheers, Tim

To me they're the claw scratch mark of the beast. But I always thought it was super cool to be able to bar scan a billboard with your camera phone. The real coolest use has to be grocery checkout though. Speeds that up immensely, not to mention error avoidance.

[Bear Bibeault]

/ducks

[Guillermo Ishi]

Slenderman from behind.

sry, just realized this thread is supposed to be questions for Oliver Dropnick.

[Bear Bibeault]

Yes, to get back on track, I'm actually kinda surprised that bar codes, useful as they are, haven't become more widely used. After all, we (almost) all have potential readers in our pockets. But the same could be said of QR codes, and perhaps even RFID.

Oliver, what do you see as the future of bar codes and of id codes (printed or electronic) in general?

[Oliver Drobnik]

I would like to split my answer between 1D and 2D barcodes because for both you can do vastly different things in terms of design.

1D:

- there is an Austrian brewery called "Stiegl" which is a collegial term for "set of stairs". And the barcode they have on their bottles is growing from left to right, just like stairs.
- Runner up is a company that made the bars of the 1D barcode strands of gras which a sheep on top grazing on it

2D:

- there are companies who modify QR codes to an extent that you almost don't recognise them as such. You can replace the "boring" black squares with colorful swatches that don't even have to have straight corners. I loved one instance where perpendicular angles between such squares had been rounded off, making the QR code look like something futuristic.


cheers

Oliver Drobnik
Cocoanetics

[Oliver Drobnik]

PS, Tim: your's is exactly the smart way to deal with boring and repetitive input tasks. Good thinking! I believe that with BarCodeKit (which comes free with my book) there will be many similar usage scenarios where people would create such a sheet of pre-made barcodes from an iPhone app,... which YOU might be creating...

regards

Oliver Drobnik
Cocoanetics