How to make a visually attractive QR code

QR codes enable website linking from mobile phones. And are a simple way to connect your prospects to your physical marketing materials.

They are butt-ugly.

Who wants to ruin a nice design with a pixellated image plonked down in the corner of the page?

We’ve found easy ways to improve the look of QR.

Unitag QR Code Generator Review

Unitag Live is a website that lets you create and customise QR codes in a huge variety of ways. More free online QR code generators have limited customisation but Unitag lets you add your logo into the code, change the corner images and alter the colours.

Unitag Live Features

The first step in the QR code creation process is picking the website your QR code will link users to. You can send them to a location using the GPS on their scanner or tell their smartphone to instantly call a number. You can even have the QR code call in a business card for the user to look at.

Once you’ve directed users to the right content you can start customising the look of your QR code. Unitag has several predefined template ideas, but gives you the power to alter every aspect of your QR code in a variety of ways.

• Colors (American spelling) – allows you to modify the QR code colour. You can also blend two colours into the QR code which gives a shaded rainbow effect across it.
• Look – this modifies the shape and style of the corners and main section of your QR code. The main section refers to the dots that make up the code.
• Logo – uploading a photo here places that uploaded image in the center of your QR code. Large files cannot be uploaded however so you’ll have to save big images as smaller ones (e.g. reduce the size in powerpoint and re-save it as another picture).
• Eyes – this feature changes the colour of the inside and outside of the corners on your QR code.
• Options – here you can change the background colour of your QR code, it’s shading and the quality of the image (the size). Be wary of altering this too much because if the background colour clashes with the QR code colour then the QR code cannot be read by scanners (e.g. dark purple QR codes on a dark blue background will not work).

You can also pay a yearly fee to get extended features from Unitag including:

• 1 or more mobile websites
• QR Codes management and storing
• High resolution exporting
• Template management
• Batch generation
• Editable QR Code content
• Tracking & analytics
• Intelligent filter (e.g. different languages)
• Multi-user accounts
• Statistics per campaign
• XLS and CSV export for statistics

Definitely explore the higher level plans if you run marketing campaigns that require heavy statistics tracking. Website clickthroughs and tracking on Google Analytics would more than likely track the same statistics, however.

If you’re looking for a simpler QR code creator online you can also try:

• http://qrcodemakr.com/
• http://www.qrstuff.com/
• http://goqr.me/
• http://www.the-qrcode-generator.com/
• http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Just to give you an idea of what these codes look like and are capable of, here’s one that leads back to the Creative Agency Secrets homepage!