Each generation of designers is luckier than the last. When I grew up the only affordable way to even open Adobe Creative Suite software wasn’t exactly legal. Since then, tools and software for design have become cheaper to try out—with free trials, monthly subscriptions and education pricing—and the tools are better than ever.
Through my website, I plan to build and provide tools to continue the trend of making life easier for designers. It’s an ambitious goal but if I can make even a small impact on the growth of young designers or speed up the design process for a few professionals, I’ll be satisfied.
Let’s start here. Alongside the launch of my design portfolio I’ve built my very own QR code generator at jwbrobst.com/qr—it's for anyone, but I've included a feature specifically catering to designers.
QR code generators are one of those incredibly useful tools that should be free and easy to use but instead greed and search engine optimization step in to suck all of the air out of the room. It feels like every time I need one I lose track the generator I didn’t hate using last time. Even then, these generators are overly-complicated, pay-walled as soon as you need extra features, and often stuffed full of trackers that don’t value the privacy of people scanning them.
As a designer I can happily skip all of the custom options that decorate the code in one way or another; if I want to change the design I’ll happily do it in Adobe Illustrator—assuming I can get an SVG file. But there’s one ‘extra’ feature that I can’t edit on my own.
If you’ve ever seen or created a QR code with a logo embedded in it, that’s made possible thanks to error correction levels. It’s essentially redundancy—if a code can’t be completely read, error correction makes sure that there’s enough information to still use the code. So, if you’re a designer, feel free to download some QR codes with high error correction, and simply delete a few chunks from the generated code before adding yours or your client’s logo. It’s not only useful for embedding logos—high error correction can make sure your code still works longer even if it’s printed and placed outdoors and exposed to the elements.
I put a lot of work into making sure this generator is as user friendly as possible too—simple things like flipping between different error correction levels on your end required plenty of thought on the backend to make it seamless. You’d think the download buttons at the bottom would be the easy part, but they had me stumped for hours—trying to understand how to download an object that didn’t exist until just now.
If it sounds like something you could use, or you just want to try it out—click here to have at it or, as you might have guessed, the image at the top of this blog was made using my own QR code generator, and a quick scan links directly to it.
I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to JavaScript so this tool only came into existence after plenty of trial and error, but it won’t be the last. In the coming months I plan to continue launching useful tools for designers. Reach out if there’s something useful you have in mind and I’ll see if I can make it possible.
