The invention relates to a method of recording machine-readable information on an article, including the steps of: providing a carrier having flakes dispersed therein onto the surface of the article, wherein all of the flakes have a beam-splitting grating pattern encoding the information thereon; aligning the flakes parallel to a sloped plane forming a slope angle with the surface of the article; and, solidifying the carrier. 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.