Method Of Recording Machine-Readable Information

A method of recording machine-readable information on an article, comprising the steps of:

• (a) providing a carrier having a plurality of flakes dispersed therein coated onto the surface of the article, wherein the plurality of flakes have a same beam-splitting grating pattern encoding the information thereon;
• (b) aligning each of the plurality of flakes parallel to a sloped plane forming a slope angle with the surface of the article;
• and,
• (c) solidifying the carrier;
• whereby the aligning step is such, that when the article is irradiated with an EM beam,
• a first portion of the EM beam is reflected from the surface of the article, forming a surface reflection,
• a second portion of the beam is reflected from the beam-splitting grating pattern, forming an arrangement of sub-beams, and
• the slope angle provides a spatial separation between the arrangement of sub-beams and the surface reflection, enabling machine-reading.