I remember a time when truncating the UPC bar code on the cover of a magazine was a huge coup. Taking the huge, lumbering code, which took up too much real estate on the cover of a publication, was bothersome and affected the design space.

Cutting the bar code by half, in height and width, was celebrated as a major advance in the much-needed item used for scanning the price by, at best, only half the retailers, seems so petty and foolish now.

When printers discovered you didn’t need to place the codes on white boxes, we rejoiced at not having the little lines popping out on what were beautiful covers, interrupted by alien chunks of absurdity. Again, it seems odd no one had discovered this fact for all the years bar codes had been used.

When we discovered that we could play with the bar codes, making fun little designs and jokes; we wondered why something so simple had escaped us for so long. We reveled in the design challenge of playing with the codes while still keeping them functional.

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