everything is. whitespace is an important part of graphic design, especially margins. think about text that's too close to the edge is the page or screen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Most readers only look at the 3 big squares to tell where the code is, and the little one to know the orientation of it, and the codes don't need to be black and white, or solid colored, but the "ones" and the "zeroes" need to be distinguishable. Some of the code can be even be missing, because of the error correction algorithm.