Very few graphic inventions have shaped the visual landscape of our everyday lives as quietly and ubiquitously as the barcode.
It’s a quiet elementary design – a (generally) tiny handful of black lines and numbers in the form of a rectangle, usually tucked away in the corner. Whilst unassuming, it’s the visual shorthand for late capitalism, the interface between shelf and spreadsheet – a graphic element that embodies the moment that products become data points. It is, at the same time, also, maybe surprisingly, an item and space that designers have been known to recontextualise, reconfigure and play with.
It’s funny to think of the barcode as something mid-century modern, but that’s exactly what it is. Within the post-war world, shipping logistics and supermarkets were scaling up, and computers were learning to count. To move the enormous amount of goods the Western world was distributing quickly, there was a need for a universal language that machines could read without complaint. This led to the barcode (or linear code), a machine legible, human-tolerant, ruthlessly efficient data representation, created by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver – first used to identify railcars.
To a scanner, a Universal Product Code (UPC) is just a rhythm of widths and gaps. It’s an incredibly efficient thing that is without aesthetic consideration. As a cultural artefact, it has, at the same time, become a marker of mass production and global distribution, encapsulating inventory, itemisation and optimisation. It is a system design made visible: modular, scalable, rule-based.
As a result, it’s become part of our everyday – something profoundly mundane – and now, it’s become something to reinterpret. Once packaging teams learned which portions of the symbol must remain inviolate for scanners, they began to decorate the edges. Whilst the central zone of the barcode stayed sacred, the surrounding silhouette grew to be a playground for designers – sprouting city skylines, hardback covers and stalks of wheat. Notably, in Japan, brands have turned barcodes into tiny illustrated worlds, which is very charming.
Within this realm, there is, perhaps, a lesson for designers, whereby we see the type of expression made possible only through restriction. The barcode works because its grammar is strict. Without altering the design of the barcode itself, designers and artists have equally co-opted the barcode as an aesthetic device, drawing on its cultural relevance – a choreography of commerce, if you will. The barcode seemingly collapses the distance between aesthetics, utility and industry. Proof that systems can carry culture.
We live in a world of data – mass data – and the barcode was, perhaps, the first step towards it. It’s a fascinating design object and something worth interrogating. Nowadays, QR codes – a now prolific extended member of the barcode family tree – symbolise a new foray into physical/digital interaction and data.
Once used primarily as an industrial part number, QR codes, exacerbated by the pandemic, quickly outgrew their original purpose to become gateways to menus, posters, and payments. Interestingly, people, generally, are less favourable of QR codes – finding them fiddly and annoying – whilst the barcode seemingly passes unnoticed. Maybe because it asks little of us. It is finite, comprehensible, and local. It encodes exactly what it needs, no more. Intrinsically, all it asks for is contrast. Accompanied by a beep, normally. A transaction acknowledged, an object accounted for, a little performance of order in a messy world.
