More decorative, designer barcodes

It’s been more than three years since we wrote about Japanese Design Barcode, with its clever and whimsical UPC designs. Proving that the idea still has plenty of merit, New Jersey-based Vanity Barcodes just launched a similar service to help businesses take advantage of what it considers the little-known marketing potential of the decorative barcode. Vanity Barcodes offers an ever-growing library of stock barcode designs that are customizable with any unique product UPC or similar code format. Birds, cows, candy bars, paint brushes, books, flowers and purses are all among the standard designs Vanity Barcodes offers, with customized pieces available as well. All codes are pretested for scan compliance to ensure that they work just as well as standard barcodes. Pricing ranges from USD 375 for one barcode design to USD 200 for 10 or more; supported code formats include UPC, EAN, JAN, ISSN, ISMN, ISSN, UCC EAN-128 and GS1-128. The result, Vanity Barcodes says, is a barcode that goes beyond functional to serve as a powerful brand asset—and it’s pretty hard to argue with that, we must confess. One to try out on your own product packaging—or to emulate for specific niches or industries? (Related: T-shirts that talk code.) Spotted by: swissmiss