The designer: templates, logo, colours, frames, patterns

What every control in the designer does, and which ones affect scanning.

Design templates

A starting point rather than a constraint: pick one, then change anything. Templates are suggestions of shape and colour that are known to scan.

Your logo

Drop an image into the middle. Error correction rises automatically to cover the modules the logo hides, so the code still reads.

Keep the logo under about a quarter of the width. Past that you are removing more of the code than the error correction can reconstruct.

Colours

Dark on light, always — the opposite of what most cameras expect is a code many of them refuse. Contrast matters more than hue: a mid-grey code on a white ground fails where a dark blue one on the same ground works.

Gradients are allowed and safe within reason. The eyes (the three big corner squares) can be coloured separately, and colouring them is the single change that most makes a code look like yours rather than generic.

Frames

A border and a caption — "SCAN ME", or your own words. Frames measurably increase how many people scan a code, because a bare code on a poster is a thing people are not sure is for them.

Patterns and background

Module shape and eye shape change the look without changing the data. A background image is allowed; the designer warns you when it is busy enough to threaten the scan and tells you what it measured.

Options

Size for the export, error-correction level, and "improve scanability", which turns error correction to its highest level and squares off the corner markers. There is also the switch for the alert emails about this one code, and — in the app — whether it is dynamic, its placement label, its campaign and its UTM tags.