QR Code Boogie

Ah QR codes, that decades old technology that's just now starting to see more use than that bar code on the side of your soup can. What are they and how can you make them work for you and your designs/ clients? Press on dear reader.



To give you the skinny, QR codes (quick response codes) are essentially machine shorthand for information. You can take this textual information and convert it into a singular image instead.  This means that say you have a message you want people to see and a link to go with it and maybe some other info, but you don't want to clutter a poster you've made and you want to make sure they take that information with them. You can utilize a QR code on that poster that will store that information for you in a convenient little image, ready to be scanned by a smartphone and then viewed by its owner.

And in case you or your client aren't incredibly tech savvy and are worried your QR code might not work if you stylize it a bit, don't worry too much. You can tweak it sufficiently and within reason to match your design composition without having to worry about breaking eye flow or your style guide. Just don't go overboard with the style and swagger.

As far as generating the QR codes themselves goes, that's where one would suspect things might get complicated or pricey. That's not entirely the case, there are several free QR code generators out there on the net that you can utilize; each with different limitations and focuses. Heck, if you want an even easier way to do it, just use goo.gl to do if for you. This will generate a QR code for a website URL you enter. Please keep in mind that ALL goo.gl will do for you is take the website URL and generate *cough*pull up*cough* a QR code for that hyperlink.

Posted in: mobile, QR codes