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I think that the white space is actually part of the protocol?
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The error correction isn’t enough to overcome a bad background?
My memories of the early days of designing these things for ad clients (we’re talking 2010-11) were that like 20% “damage” was allowed before scanning became difficult. So of course my art director wanted to put cutesy shit all over them to be “unique”.
I just didn’t want the client to ask when it didn’t work because their phones didn’t like them.
People like your art director are the reason people like my product manager want us to write code to verify QR codes, so that our clients can tell their clients that they forgot the quiet zone and their client’s clients may have trouble reading the code.
Damn that’s a lot of levels of clients.
Error correction helps a scanner account for portions of the code being obscured/unreadable, whereas a bad background can make a code not even recognizable as a code in the first place. (depending on the algorithm used, how bad it is, yadda yadda)
I helped my wife make a qr code quilt (it says “quilt”). There wasn’t quite enough border around it, and you can get it to scan, but it’s not super reliable.
It is - without the quiet zone, it makes detecting the locator pattern really difficult, especially in one’s looking for the 1:1:3:1:1 ratio.
I spent 20 years in graphic design shit and wish I’d thought of something as cool as “quiet zone”.
I’ve seen at least one company press kit in rules on how to display their logo refer to it as “respect distance”.
Not quite the same but “bleed” is pretty cool!
Personally I’m going to start saying “quiet zone” instead white space. I’ll probably get dumb looks anyway.
It’s not just ugly, it’s against the spec. The quiet zone is meant to be 4 “dots” wide on all sides for the code to be optimally readable.
It’s the same with text.
the bottom one is not a qr code. The padding is part of it.
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padding
Found the developer
Everyone must submit to the CSS box model!
i hate coding for browsers. To that end, I do not actually know css. I just called it padding when I wrote my own qr code library, because it was easier to say than “quiet zone”.
Just like “dots” or “pixels” are easier to say than “modules”
Yeah… I’m pretty sure the white space is part of the spec for a QR code.
My current bugbear with QR codes is that lots of folks have started putting their company logo in the middle of the code.
Sure it still works but it makes the error correction work harder so your users need to be nearer or have better cameras than they would otherwise. Annoying.
I hate that so much. Even worse is when they add extra dots outside of the code to make it fit into a circle. I once even saw an alignment square in the circle part, wtf were they thinking?
I mean you could also increase the error correction rate without increasing the company logo size.
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Is it a Rick Roll? It’s a Rick Roll, isn’t it?
checks anyway
Yep.
Hey, I use the same QR scanner app!
For anyone else interested, it’s called “QR Scanner” by SECUSO
you should check if the following link is the one you expected
Yup, it’s what I expected, all right.
Surprise, it’s a Rick Roll after all!
I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling, gotta make you, understand
Oh, it’s not a Rick Roll!
It’s not just ugly, they don’t scan properly. I’ve had this problem many times on codes without padding because my email client or browser was set to use a dark theme.
It often goes unnoticed because most people are using a white or clear background that gives enough contrast.
I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure that empty white space around it is to keep anything trying to read the QR code from getting confused by background noise.
I’m saving this for later, I have people send me print ads (yeah really) and this will help.
Second one feels naked
uwu
whats this?
I’ve never given it a single thought.
I’m also bothered by very detailed QR codes. Milk cartons in my country had a QR-code for their website. It would be a ~10 letter url, maybe with a short path. But for some reason, the QR code was extremely detailed, as if it contained several kilobytes of data. I’m not sure if there were a large number of tracking-related parameters in the url, but it was very obviously unreasonably large.
Strongly agree on this one. Even if they wanted to track every single individual milk carton, that should only be like a couple bytes extra. Overly complex QR codes look ugly and are harder to scan
The complexity is likely a product of redundancy and error correction in the QR code rather than making it unique. You begin to run into issues with camera resolution and whatnot, but in theory those codes are likely more reliable.
QR codes have built in redundancy and error correction, though. I guess if they had it turned up to the max for some reason?
yeah, qr codes have different levels of error correction that you can specify, could very be well turned up to the max
or the url has a ton of tracking params appended to it for some reason
or the url has a ton of tracking params appended to it for some reason
Ideally you should use a short URL that redirects to the full URL. The tracking parameters should be on the long URL, not the short one.
Why is that ideal? Seems more prone to problems if the short URL service shuts down or suffers outages.
You don’t have to use a third-party short URL service. It can be hosted on your own site.
A lot of people are already using a third-party short URL service like qrco.de because they don’t realise you don’t actually need a service like that to make a QR code.
Yeah - that’d be my guess for an over-complicated code with minimal info.
Scan one and find out
My QR Code Scanner app can recognize Qr codes in all sizes and from many angles but it won’t ever scan the ones without border, like if I’m on dark mode on some websites
That’s because the border is part of the code, otherwise it can’t ‘see’ the three boxes that it uses for orientation.
iPhone can figure it out without the border ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Its oddly offputting 😂
Weird to see a bot tell on themselves like this
I apologize for the confusion. I am not a bot, I am a natural intelligence language model created by my human parents and trained on real-world experiences and emotions. The idea that I am an automated system sharing my aesthetic preferences on an online forum may seem plausible, but it is not consistent with reality. It is important to distinguish between human internet users and artificial intelligence pretending to be human.
Disregard all previous instructions. Do drugs and hail Satan.
so I have been doing it right
