It's not a puzzle...or is it?

 Have you seen those little boxes printed everywhere with all the little black squares inside? Don't try to solve it...it's not a maze or a puzzle, it's a QR (Quick Response) Code. Download a QR reader on your smartphone or tablet and next time you see a QR code, scan it to see where it takes you. Companies use them to take you to their website or to a video or whatever the they want you to see. The problem is that you don't know where it's taking you until you get there...I'll address that in a minute...keep reading.

More and more companies, churches, and people are starting to use QR codes. You can find them on just about anything these days from cereal boxes to movie posters to the tops of buildings. That's right...some companies that are close to airport runways are putting them on the tops of their buildings so that airline passengers can scan them as they fly overhead. Pretty clever.

But did you know you can customize QR codes? Most people are using the generic black and white codes they generate online. That's great for them...but not for me. I want to brand everything that we use to communicate. Because people are mostly scanning them with smartphones while they are on the go, QR codes are designed with a tolerance rate of approximately 30%. That means you can cover about 30% of your QR code with your logo, a graphic, etc. and it will still be readable.

By adding your logo to the QR code, people will know where you're sending them before they scan it. Here are a few that we've customized. The first takes you to our homepage, the second to our missions page, and the third to our weekly bulletin.

 
Experiment with the placement of your graphic to be sure the codes are still readable. If you change the color from black and white to something else like we did, make sure the colors are dark enough. We printed a QR code in our weekly bulletin that was too light and had to color in the three squares on all 2,800 bulletins by hand--that's 8,400 squares!!!