12/20/2023 0 Comments Pixen car audioI’m sure there are more clever ways of toying with the palette of a logo, but I’ll let that go for another time.īut wait, there’s more. Putting in a full color graphic – especially one that defines itself from a background with a dark edge like an icon – gets around the need for a white border all the way around a logo. If the Firefox logo had a white border, the logo would cover more than 30% of the QR code. This can be exploited by adding both visual contrast and getting rid of the 1-pixel border that is required of a 1-bit graphic. Since the blue in Big Blue is fairly dark, it registers as a dark pixel. QR code interpreters don’t care if a pixel is white, black, red, orange, or maroon – only contrast matters. I did come up with smaller one, but it really doesn’t look as good. Yes, I used a Version 14 QR code for this, meaning it’s 73 pixels on a side. If a logo already has alternating black and white pixels, like the AT&T ‘Death Star’ for example, it’s fairly easy to have that logo overlap the timing pattern. That’s all well and good, but what if you want to put a logo in a QR code that a little bit larger than what would ‘normally’ be permitted? What if, for example, you wanted to tread into the timing area on the top and left side of a QR code? This is where design comes in. This little guy is going on our business cards. After typing in “ as the code I want embedded, I ended up with this: It allows you to select the QR version number and the error correction level. I used this site to generate all my QR codes for this post. It looks like this graphic is okay, so we move onto the next step: putting a real QR code in this thing. Since we’re doing a Version 6 QR code, about 51 of these cells can be covered up. Then we physically count the number of 8 pixel cells that are obscured by the logo. After overlaying the Hack A Day logo on top of the color map of the QR code, we get this: Of course, I’m sure someone will come up with a great design that ignores this technique, but I’ll just do it this way for now. If there wasn’t a white border going around the logo, the random black and white pixels would be placed right against the logo. It’s important to include both positive and negative space when designing this logo. So, how do we implement this? First, we start out with a crappily-drawn Hack A Day logo: with 172 areas, that means about 51 of them can be altered in any way, shape or form. Now, the million dollar question: why is knowing how the bytes are arranged in a QR code important? The answer is with a high level of error correction, about 30% of these bytes can be complete gibberish, and your phone will still be able to read the QR code. Each of these 8-pixel parts translate into one byte of data in an alphanumeric QR code. Some of these zones are non-contiguous, so I drew black lines connecting the corresponding parts. If anyone wants to 4-color map theorem this, I’ll gladly update it. The gray part of this graphic is separated into 172 8-pixel zones, as shown below: In practice, what is actually necessary is a little different, but I’ll just go with the specs for now.īlack in this graphic will always be black, white pixels in this graphic will always be white, red is a “keep out zone,” and gray is “don’t care.” The alternating black and white band on the top and left side of the QR code is the ‘timing pattern.’ This is the little bit that divides everything on the QR code into columns and rows. The graphic below shows what is absolutely required of a Version 6 QR code standard. The Version 6 QR code is 41 pixels square, and is a very good balance between the amount of data that can be presented and the physical size of the code itself. The tools I used were Photoshop, this QR code generator, and Microsoft Paint (I’ve never seen a program to edit individual pixels that has a better UI, so don’t laugh).įor this ‘how-to,’ I’m going to walk through the process of modifying a Version 6 QR code. I’ll fully admit I geeked out a little, but in the process I figured out some of the theory behind embedding logos in QR codes.Īfter getting my hands on the ISO 18004 specification for QR codes, I decided to try embedding the Hack A Day skull & wrenches inside a QR code. After writing this post on somone hacking QR codes, Hack A Day commenters came out in full force posting some really cool links about modifying QR codes to include a logo.
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