QR Codes — A Marketing Trend that Needs to Die.

QR Codes have been around for nearly twenty years. Until the last few years this technology has lived behind the scenes—in a functional world not designed to be consumer facing at all.

Universally, I think most good designers would agree that the QR trend has gone way too far.  Though the technology is very interesting, and admittedly has a lot of potential, these  digital patches rarely do more than get in the way when the primary audience is human eyes.  When "QR-Reader-Vision" becomes an accessory to laser  eye surgery, these scan codes will be a successful way to share information to humans. Until that day, I strongly recommend against using QR codes for marketing purposes when that is any other option.  Its really the same reason I would recommend against using a Spanish headline in Japan—any primary message that cannot be understood by the person viewing it is not only a waste of space, but utterly confuses the rest of your message.

From my experience, the use of these codes is usually pushed by the business/marketing side of an operation and not by art-directors or designers.  Whether a left-brained business pro or a right-brained creative genius, we can look at the numbers to show how many people are actually using these scan codes to access information.  Forbes published  an interesting article documenting this.

Are QR Codes Dead? —Forbes

Marketing trends come and go, but for some reason this one has hung around slightly longer than usual despite its ineffective prominence.  As designers, marketers, culture-makers, and business professionals lets try to start 2013 right and make this the year that QR codes die.