Last October, we introduced a QR treasure hunt game at Online News Association that was an instant success. By that, I mean we had participants skipping sessions to look for the 2-D bar code with the message that they had won the flying monkey slingshot. Everywhere you went, you heard people buzzing about QR codes.

Then we followed that up with a well-attended boot camp on how to make these puppies, which pretty much involves typing your message into a website and pushing the “create my QR code!” button.

It never occurred to me there could be more.

But the CEO of Paperlinks (an iPhone app with accolades) says the digitized pattern can now be a work of art as well. You can add color, round the corners, give them depth, stick your company name in the middle of them. Not a superficial idea if you are using these on your business cards or as a logo.

And where would you go to add these visual treats? In your shoes, I’d start with … oh, Paperlinks. If you are lucky enough to have a developer on your team, that person can likely design for appearance. If it’s truly integral to your project, you might cough up some cash for a professional like Patrick Donnelly. His gallery alone is fun to flip through.

Other sites to play with:

http://rasoftwarefactory.com/qr-generator/

http://www.qrstuff.com

http://soqr.fr/designqr

http://uQR.me

Or, you can just read about it at Hamilton Chen’s blog posting and dream this weekend.