Crafting QR Codes: A deep dive into QR code art (2024)
kylezhe.ng
kylezhe.ng
One part which I barely touched was how to mathematically "force" pixels in the error correction section. It's an extension of the ideas covered in https://research.swtch.com/qart but unfortunately I don't grasp it well enough to explain properly.
Tangentially related: https://blog.vrypan.net/2026/07/07/where-is-qrdo/ It's a "where is the QR" game, where a mobile is more capable in finding the pattern than a human.
Hiding the code is maybe not good for getting scans but a nice idea for some kind games... can imagine this being a part of an "Escape Room" game :D
I found that they are still pretty useful because they're noticeably smaller grids. They can be enlarged to use up the same space on screen/print as a denser UTF-8 QR, thus be clearer and easier to scan. Some readers will assume that an all-uppercase URL is supposed to be lowercase and convert it, others will use them as-is. Use short URLs, like https://qr.test/thing so only the case of the path part matters, then make sure /thing and /THING go to the same place, and you're good.
Thanks for the informative guide.
I found support for generating it to be hit or miss with the free online generators, but it really improved scannability for a QR I was pasting onto a vehicle!
What I would love to see as a companion to this is some sort of rigors benchmark for scanning that attempts to quantify how much real-world scanability is lost. There must be some decoding benchmarks out there that simulate common types of distortion, damage and degradation. What did the original designed of the QR code use to evaluate their work?
Marketing love it: they want everything to carry the brand.
I like it from a nerdy PoV, my home WiFi QR used to be⁰ vaguely a picture of my face.
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[0] I didn't bother updating it when I last rearranged my network, it got used precisely twice, three times if you count the friend's phone that didn't like it¹, so I just read out the password for him to enter which is what I do now when needed
[1] This may be due to it being a huge low-correcting QR - I had the tool that made it use the largest code it supported and reduce the error correction to minimum to get the most controllable pixels for the image