As many of you know, differentiating your brand from a competitor’s is quite important when there is so many around. We came across a pretty neat way for you to achieve this. Did you know when looking at the laser printing of your serialized data on a carton, the “black box” containing your serialization information doesn’t have to be black? Some companies are choosing to match or compliment their brand by having the laser code on a more colorful surface than black.

Many darker shades of solid colors can do the job. The trick, in Pantone terms, is to keep the percentage of red as low as possible. When trying to produce ISO grades, the barcode readers and scanners for verification both use red light which, if the color contains a significant percentage of red, makes it either impossible to read the laser code or lowers the contrast thus reducing the apparent grade of the code. So those brands incorporating any shade of red (or more than 10-15{7442afb559fe364fb8aae92c11fe80fccc8a8ac26fd7100d5b760de2a8aa7d4d} red) should stick to the good old-fashioned black box or choose a complimentary color! Below are a few examples of this.

Source(s): http://packaging.alltop.com/