Create better QR codes

Mike Bedford reveals how to get creative with your QR codes to draw attention to them better and help people sign up to newsletters and more.

- Mike Bedford

QR codes, those two-dimensional barcodes that whisk you off to a web page when you scan them with your phone, have had a chequered history. Invented in the ’90s and used extensively in Japan, their belated introduction to the rest of the world was short-lived before heading for apparent extinction. You’ll probably have noticed, though, that they’re now enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Fuelled by their use during the Covid pandemic – remember having to scan QR codes to enter restaurants and pubs? – we’re now seeing them everywhere as everyone has been trained up to use them.

If you own a business, putting a code on your business card or brochure makes it far easier for potential clients to access your website. If you edit a newsletter for your sports team, code club or local community, QR codes can engage your readers better than a printed URL. What’s more, some publications allow images in their small advertisement columns, so using QR codes there is another option. But here’s an interesting thing: recent surveys have shown – hardly surprisingly – that if you move away from a boring black-and-white matrix to something more creative, you’ll get far more hits. So, the subject of this tutorial is how to create artistic QR codes.

The basic code Our approach for creating QR codes that stand out from the crowd is to create an ordinary QR code and edit it. Because while there are plenty of tools for generating basic ordinary QR codes, we don’t know of any Linux utilities for producing artistic variants, but we do have some good image-editing tools, such as GIMP, which we’re using here.