Custom / Branded QR (logo, colour)
Branded QR codes with your colours and logo — and a warning when they stop scanning.
What to encode
How this processes your file
The code is encoded on a canvas and the logo drawn over the middle of it, inside a small padded box. That works only because QR encoding carries redundancy: the modules under the logo are destroyed, and error correction is what puts them back. So a logo forces the correction level to High, where roughly 30% of the code can be lost and still read, and the tool reports how much of the area the logo covers. Colours are checked the way a scanner sees them — as light and dark after thresholding, not as colours — which needs considerably more separation than text on a page does.
What the results mean
- Error correction
- How much of the code can be damaged or covered and still read. Low packs more data; High survives a logo, a scuff or a fold.
- Logo covers
- The share of the code hidden by your logo. Beyond roughly 9% you are eating into the redundancy that also has to absorb print defects.
- Colour contrast
- Whether a camera can separate the modules from the background. Two colours can look very different and still threshold to the same grey.
- Density
- How many modules the payload needs. A long URL at High correction produces a fine grid that struggles at small print sizes.
Common problems and fixes
- The code scans on my phone but not on others
- That is the signature of a code with too little margin — a new phone camera in good light forgives what a cheap one in a restaurant does not. Raise the correction level, shrink the logo, and increase the contrast.
- My brand colours are too similar
- Use the brand colour for the dark modules and keep the background white or near-white. An inverted code — light modules on dark — also fails on some older scanners regardless of contrast.
- The logo makes it unreadable
- Shrink it. A mark that reads at 15% of the width is enough for recognition, and it leaves the redundancy for print defects rather than spending it all on branding.
- I need to change where it points after printing
- You cannot with a static code. Point it at a short URL on a domain you control and change the redirect behind it — that decision has to be made before printing, not after.
Frequently asked questions
Can I put a logo in the middle of a QR code?
Yes, within limits. QR encoding includes error correction, so a portion of the code can be missing and still read — at the High level, roughly 30%. A centre logo spends part of that budget, and print defects, folds and poor light spend the rest. Keeping the logo to under about a tenth of the area, with High correction, leaves enough margin for the real world.
Do coloured QR codes still work?
They can, if the dark modules are genuinely dark and the background genuinely light. A scanner thresholds the image into two levels, so what matters is brightness difference rather than colour difference — two colours that look strikingly different can threshold to the same grey. This tool checks that and says when a combination will fail, which is stricter than looking at it on a bright screen.
Is this a dynamic QR code?
No. It is a static code, meaning the destination is fixed when you print it. Dynamic codes point at a redirect service that can be re-targeted later, which is a subscription rather than an image — if you may need to change the destination, encode a short URL on a domain you control.
Is the URL I enter logged?
No. The code is generated by your browser and this page has no endpoint to log to. That is worth knowing in this category specifically: many free QR generators are ad-supported services that record every link they encode.