They’re peppered everywhere from beer bottles to billboards. The little black and white matrix has infiltrated the market from every angle. The question is, why have they landed on this planet?

The QR code was initially created for the automotive industry to track vehicles during the manufacturing process. Due to its fast readability and storage capacity, this little module has been adopted in every corner of the market. Without getting into the Wikipedia details and all their gritty specifications, the QR code is undoubtedly a convenient and speedy way to communicate information.

As a designer often confronted with the demand to contaminate my otherwise flawless design, I still have to ask myself – do they have to be so ugly? After more research, I found that they do not. It’s just a matter of how “scanable” you require them to be. Thanks to error correction (and Wikipedia) it is possible to take artistic liberties with QR codes and still have them scan correctly, but contain intentional errors that allow them to be more attractive and, in turn, less repelling.

The only question you have to ask yourself is now, after all this work, where is this fancy little vehicle taking you? In the end, the destination is probably more important than the aforementioned designer rant.