For Celebrities and Fans Alike, GetQR Shows A New Side to QR Codes

In the two years since Katy Perry showed off her QR code tattoo, QR codes have evolved from static utilities to dynamic, accessible, and colorfully branded tools.

QR codes: Those scannable black-and-white-box images that take you to a website where you can join a celebrity’s membership or purchase merchandise. Two years ago, Katy Perry took one to the red carpet at the MTV Video Music Awards, sporting a QR code tattoo that, when scanned, took fans to a pre-order website for her album 143 and to exclusive merch. What that moment demonstrated was that QR codes don’t need to be static utilities; they can be part of a celebrity’s or brand’s aesthetic, as well. Now, two years later, a few companies like GetQR are helping brands make that happen. They aren't doing that with tattoos, but by offering customizable, editable QR codes that break out of that old black-and-white box to offer color and pizzazz.

Using dynamic QR codes comes with some risk; the more you alter the aesthetic, changing the color, line thickness, or shape, the more likely it is that you may inadvertently introduce errors in the code that affect its scannability and defeat the purpose. It’s an issue small brands are concerned about, even as more brands move to using customizable, branded QR codes in all of their marketing collateral.

GetQR.com was created to bridge that gap between art and utility, and to do so in a way that would be accessible to small brands, young entrepreneurs, and indie artists. These are artists who may lack the staff and resources to employ a complex and expensive enterprise solution for their marketing needs, but who may be wary of just going to a free, overly simplistic website that promises a colorful QR code but could deliver a code that doesn’t work. GetQR allows users to create and edit a colorful code without needing any technical expertise to do so.

Yet the website also offers advanced features like tracking and branding, slimmed down from what you would get with an enterprise system, but designed for the needs of the small brand or the young artist. The result GetQR promises is a range of attractive and more scannable QR codes. In colors from indigo to maroon, you can design your own QR code and add your own logo, providing something that feels like you and your brand, something that visually invites fans to lift their camera phones and click.

The codes are also dynamic, meaning that even after the code is deployed, you can update which page on your website it directs users toward. That functionality has led to the adoption of dynamic QR codes across a lot of businesses that need to update landing pages often – restaurants with seasonal and holiday menus, musicians with tours, events, and limited-time, exclusive merchandise, and retailers and photographers running thirty-day fire sales. These are all examples of brands that may need to print and distribute QR codes on flyers, business cards, or menus, but need to make sure their codes go somewhere useful after the landing page has moved or changed.

That is why tracking your codes is so important, and that’s where GetQR hopes to become a go-to resource. In theory, with time and effort, anyone can make a colorful QR code and test it repeatedly to make sure they haven’t broken the code, but you also have to keep track of where each code is sending people and update that as needed. Offering quick customization and easy tracking, GetQR.com hopes to generate almost two million unique QR codes by this summer.

And who knows? Maybe the next time a celebrity appears on the red carpet with a QR code tattoo, it will be brightly colored and point to a different website each time they show it.