Ever since the smartphone era began, companies have looked for ways to quickly get information from the offline product world onto the phone. Barcode scanning is a popular approach while QR codes and proprietary tags, such as those from Microsoft, are other solutions. These all require cameras and specifically printed codes; what if we could just use what looks like a standard ink solution and the touchscreen on our phones?

That’s exactly the idea behind Printechnologic’s Touchcode; the German company has developed an electronic print product with interactivity. Printed material using Touchcode technology looks no different than a standard print product, is recyclable and can be used on a range of products, such as tickets, food items, business cards, or nearly anything that you can put ink on. A customizable electronic code embedded in the print process interacts with a phone’s capacitive screen, much like your fingers do, giving the handset a web address or file download, for example. Here’s how the company describes it:

“Touchcode is an invisible electronic code printed on paper, cardboard, film or labels. Just put the product on the display of your smartphone/tablet/multitouch device to read the data – no matter if you’d like to confirm the authenticity of your brand product or make your card game come to life. With Touchcode, you add interactivity to just about any product.”

It’s a simply elegant solution and takes advantage of the growing number of touchscreen devices in the mobile market. DisplaySearch estimates that 2011 saw 566 million touch screen shipments for mobile phones, with rapid expansion going forward. Here’s an interactive video demo on the Touchcode.de website showing how Touchcode works and explaining the many possibilities for the product:

Touchcode is ingenious because it directly bridges the physical and digital worlds with a medium that’s been used for thousands of years: Ink. The products looks no different than any printed medium today. And they gain the extra characteristic of working with a capacitive touch screen.

Imagine tapping a printed card in Starbucks to your handset for a direct download of the tune currently playing. Maybe a printed concert ticket can open up a web page with the artist’s bio or an advance listen to an upcoming but unpublished song. Or instead of manually logging your food with a barcode, the food packaging itself contains a link to the nutritional values and can log the entry for you while also providing relevant recipes.

The idea behind these interactive codes has really never been the problem in adoption. Instead, the implementations haven’t been quite as universal as they need to be. Near-field communications, or NFC, tags could help, but they require both the tag and a phone with an NFC reader. Barcodes are probably the next best thing up until now, but are an electronic-only solution; unless you’ve learned to “read” a barcode yourself, they add little value alone.

Printed materials with Touchcode technology offer two solutions, however. The printed information itself is understandable by anyone who can read while extra information or links to other data works with a touch-capable smartphone. I’d call that a win all around if Touchcode can get clients to start using its codes during the print process.

Every touch point of a brand plays a vital role in brand recall, but the brand mark is the heart and soul of a brand’s image. Whilst it’s the interplay between colour, typeface, and symbol that creates a brand mark, colour is registered by the brain before either images or typography. A University of Loyola, Maryland study recently found the correct use of colour could increase brand recognition by up to 80%.

So what colour is best for your organisation or companies logo?

Here are two infographics and two charts to help. Click on each one to see a larger version. If you have trouble seeing the large version, right click on the image and select “Open Link in New Tab”.

The psychology of colour

The emotions of colour

How do colours affect purchases?

Colours in branding

If you need further help with design and are located around the Christchurch and Canterbury (NZ) area, CQ’s consultants and designers can meet you for a design consultation. Contact us here.

I find it particularly useful to know the different aspect ratios of business cards around the world. (Remember that 1 inch = 25.4 millimetres).

Click here for New Zealand business card information.

Below this, you’ll find links to previous articles about business cards.

NOTE: If you’re having trouble seeing the large version, right click on the image and select “Open Link in New Tab”.

50 Extremely Creative & Original Business Cards & Tutorials

How to Create OCR Scannable Business Cards

Play your (business) cards right

Interactive business card idea

Cool Business Cards

For Valentine’s Day, they have released a video to promote the Red Blooded notebook which has been recently added to the Field Notes standard product line.

The notebook becomes a love letter and is a very inspiring and beautiful example of the power of creative books and print.

Traditional printed circulars have proven to be significantly more popular and effective among today’s shoppers than electronic-based direct marketing materials, according to a new Nielsen survey.

The market research company’s Evolution of Circulars survey, published last month, found that printed marketing materials such as direct mail, newspaper inserts, and in-store catalogues were the most popular of all retail-related direct marketing materials, with roughly 60 per cent of consumers looking at them once a week.

Additionally, the survey unearthed a surprise finding that direct mail is marginally more effective on the ‘Millenial’ generation than on the older Generation-X shoppers, confounding the common belief that the future of marketing will be solely online.

Taking in a sample number of 11,000 shoppers, the Nielsen poll also found that a whopping 90 per cent of shoppers surveyed wished to continue receiving paper-based marketing materials at home or in-store, while only 70 per cent expressed the desire for electronic messaging delivery.

One of the trends picked up in the survey was the shift of in-store marketing materials to mobile devices, with 18 per cent of shoppers using a mobile phone to see what’s available in-store and 33 per cent using a tablet device, with almost two-thirds of shoppers researching that information from home computers.

What the direct marketing industry can take away from this survey is the knowledge that, while digital and mobile marketing channels are well and truly on the rise, it will not be to the detriment of traditional channels, but in addition to printed marketing materials.

Source: Directmag

2011 has been a year unlike any other for Christchurch. For those readers of this blog who are overseas, our City has faced many large earthquakes this year (as well as two heavy dumps of snow). We are now a city without a central business district, and Cantabrian’s have had to adapt extremely quickly to the rapid changes that occurred.

Fortunately for CQ, our building was relatively unharmed. Once we pushed the digital presses back into place and had the building inspected, we were back up and running a day or two later.

Our mission statement is “We love helping” and it was a privilege to be able to open our doors to five other business who needed temporary premises after the 22nd of February. We also found that old rules of business engagement were re-written, as we were also able to help companies that we would normally have been in competition with. This camaraderie was witnessed in business circles all over Christchurch and was wonderful to see on a city-wide basis.

It’s definitely a year that we won’t forget and will always look back on for many years to come.

It’s because of this that we would like to give a very special and heartfelt THANK YOU to our customers for your continued business this year. We hope that amongst all these changes, we managed to remain a constant and reliable supplier, who helped in giving you some peace of mind throughout the year.

And as I’m writing this we have just had another large aftershock. The first for a very long time. Staff are now ringing family to check on loved ones.

Let’s pray that 2012 is a lot better for Christchurch!

The Institute of Physics has created QR Codes on beer mats with a technology theme (images below) to make people think. The idea is to get pub goers thinking about physics-based technologies such as the Internet, MP3 players, Smartphones and GPS. 50,000 beer mats with questions have gone out to 50 pubs around Brighton and Hove and customers can test their knowledge by texting in the answer or scanning a QR code on the back of the beer mat.

QR CODE – Content-rich Resume from Victor petit on Vimeo.

Prepare to feel really inadequate about your chosen resume font. This dude has fashioned a custom QR code resume that is sure to break up the monotony of any HR person’s day.

Made by Victor Petit — who was looking for an internship but recently scored one — this resume is reminiscent of band Cassius’s video and accompanying app [iTunes link] for “I Love You So.” It features a QR code in the middle of a picture of a face (on the back of a printed resume) that unlocks a video of the missing mouth on your phone.

“I realized during my previous job search that getting an interview at a communication agency is the hardest part of the process,” says Petit. “I tried to create a CV that would enable me to express myself vocally as soon as they read the paper version. The combination of a sheet of paper and a QR code felt like the best way to reach that goal.”

We’re not sure what exactly Petit’s skills are from the video alone — it has no sound — aside from being extremely awesome.

It’s physicality.

No matter what people may say – print is not dead, and it never will be. The tactile learner within us needs it.

We store books, we stack them, we design furniture to showcase them, and we design room interiors around them.

You’ll never get that with an eBook.

In the same way that bar codes don’t have to be boring, quick response codes can also be creative. Thanks to a 30% tolerance in readability, you can have some real fun with clever designs. Besides looking good, this can also make them more successful.

“Designer QR codes are not only a way to make your 2D barcode stand out, but they also add a more human element to the otherwise cold and techie appearance,” says Patrick Donnelly, QR code designer and expert. “This could be the difference between someone scanning your code or not.”

Take a look through the image gallery for 15 brilliant designs created for a range of businesses from big names such as Disney, little names such as local restaurants and even conceptual ideas. Let us know in the comments if a clever design would make you more likely to scan a code.

Click on each image to see larger.