Hi all,
Today's post will be the second post about stickers in two weeks, but it's a fun follow up to last week's, so bear with me.
Periodically, I visit my everyday carry (basically, the stuff that goes in my pockets) as my life circumstances change and I have different needs. In response to an old post on the topic, my friend noted that I'd carry a small pocket knife to open boxes, whereas he we would walk across the kitchen to get a pair of scissors from the drawer. On the flip side, he'd stick with his relatively boring, stable job, whereas I've quit my job to start companies. In the micro, I was quite lazy, but in the macro, quite ambitious. (He said he was the other guy.)
Anyway... there's something I enjoy about designing better solutions for the micro interactions and small, every day things.
I'd noticed I had quite a few bar code scan membership cards and I wanted to streamline. Pulling my wallet out, grabbing a card, and scanning it was just too much. (Very micro-lazy, indeed!) And they took up too much space. There had to be a better way!
Two things occurred to me. First, that my phone was way easier to slide in and out of my pocket than my wallet. Second, the barcodes didn't need to be on a plastic card. They could be on anything.
I experimented with some DIY laser printer sticker paper I bought online. I recreated the barcodes from scratch to create a high quality pdf, printed up a sticker, and slapped it on my phone. While it worked, I found that the sticker quickly degraded from abrasion and wear and tear in my pocket. I shelved the idea and put it away.
Fast forward to last week's blog post, and one of my readers, Mark, volunteered that he had a commercial sticker printing machine. I told him about my previous experiments and he shared that using foil or a laminate layer would provide superior abrasion resistance.
So now I have my own, reader printed, commercial quality, custom barcode sticker for the back of my phone. And this is how I've been scanning at the gym. (And various other places that need bar codes.)
Pics below, but somewhat redacted as I don't want people stealing my codes :-).
Best regards,
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer