We use the theory of the quantum group U q gl 2 to develop a quantum theory of invariants and show a decomposition of invariants into a Gordan-Capelli series. Higher binary forms are introduced on the basis of braided algebras. We define quantised invariants and give basic examples. We show that the symbolic method of Clebsch and Gordan works also in the quantised case. We discuss the deformed discriminant of the quadratic and the cubic form, the deformed invariants I 1 , I 2 of the quartic form and further invariants without a classical analog.