Following the theme set by PostEurop for 2012, the Europa stamps highlight reasons for visiting the issuing country, in this case Iceland. Deliberations on the best way to communicate visual messages in the terse form of the postage stamp while at the same time introducing Iceland as a tourist attraction resulted in the combination of images and QR-codes. The Icelandic Europa stamps are the first where the motifs, a geyser and the northern lights, are built into the codes. Using QR-codes as barcodes in various media has increased greatly of late.

QR-codes are so-called two-dimensional codes. Thus, they differ from other traditional barcodes which are onedimensional. This means that the QR-codes can store more information than traditional barcodes, for instance URL’s, address cards and even text files.

Tweet