Those who are in the desktop publishing industry will be no stranger to the different types of software developed and marketed by the likes of Adobe. Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign are a few of those popular design software that advertising agencies use to create marketing materials like brochures, flyers, company profiles, print ads, etc. These software don't come cheap. However, in the long run, it is worth the money because Adobe software is widely used and is extremely versatile.

Recently, we caught wind that there was an add-on released by Teacup Software that is related to 2D barcodes, or more popularly known as quick response codes (QR Codes). For those who already have Adobe InDesign in their computers can purchase the add-on for USD$169 and create QR Codes with the program.

Without such add-ons, designers and desktop publishers would have to resort to creating a QR Code first. Free QR Code creation services can be found easily (for free) everywhere on the internet, so, it is only a matter of creating it, downloading the image file and then pasting it into the design. The setback for that is that there is no altering of the QR Code and it is deemed a little inconvenient, although we beg to differ. Creating a QR Code for just about anything takes only minutes these days and most of these QR Code images can be repeatedly used, the quality of which is rather good too.

With the QR Code creation software, the QR Code is in vector format; altering and coloring the QR Code with InDesign software is possible. It is something that QR Code marketing and advertising people has been looking forward to.

Let's admit this, QR Code without the colors is hardly interesting. It is just a black and white box of squares. Not very attention-grabbing. Advertisers will be more inclined to advertise and make use of QR Codes if they had a better way of controlling the appeal of the code and navigate their way around how the code looks to their consumers.

At this point in time, one can add images, logos, pictures and such into a QR Code without altering the effectiveness of the code. But it would be more cumbersome to change the color of the QR Code to something like red-black, white-navy or orange-dark gray.

What we think is that although it would be useful to have a software like that, the price for the add-on is a little excessive. One would have to be intensively focused on developing funky-looking QR Codes to invest in the add-on.