Apple’s App Store Gift Cards Design

Apple’s App Store gift cards have a special trick: you can simply hold one up to your iPhone or Mac’s camera and it’ll automatically scan in the code and redeem the card for you. As developers, we thought it’d be cool to print some of our own promo code cards to give away at events, so we tried to create our own scannable cards. Turns out, there’s more to it than meets the eye…

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We tried various font matching services. We scanned old cards and put the image through typeface recognition – no success.

The reverse engineering documented here is very cool. The secret fonts appear to be a modified version of OCR-B, a monospace font developed for the company Monotype in 1968 by the famous Swiss typeface designer Adrian Frutiger. It was designed specifically for optical character recognition in financial and banking uses. It eventually became an ISO standard (ISO 1073-2:1976).