Why bother branding a QR?
A QR with your logo gets ~30% more scans than a naked one. Why? Trust. People scan things they recognize. A branded QR signals "this came from a real business" and reduces the hesitation that even one second of doubt creates.
The error-correction trick
Putting a logo over QR modules removes them — but QR codes are designed to survive that. By bumping error correction to H (30% loss tolerance) you create enough redundancy to completely cover the center with a logo and still scan reliably. Most QR generators (including ours) do this automatically when you upload a logo.
Logo sizing rules
Keep your logo to 20–25% of the QR’s total width. Anything bigger eats into too many modules and starts failing on cheap scanners. Center it perfectly — off-center logos sometimes overlap the position-detection corner squares, which is the one part of the QR that absolutely must stay intact.
- Sweet spot: 20–25% of QR width
- Always center horizontally and vertically
- Add 4–6 px of white padding behind the logo
- Avoid covering any of the three corner squares
Color & gradients
You can color the dots, the eye squares, the eye dots, and the background independently. Brand colors look great as long as you maintain the dark-on-light contrast rule. Gradients are fine — just make sure the lightest point of your gradient is still noticeably darker than the background.
Logo shape & style
Simple wordmarks and bold pictograms scan best. Detailed photographs in the center are a bad idea — they’re visually busy and reduce camera contrast on the surrounding dots. A flat colored SVG or PNG with a transparent background almost always wins.
- Always use error-correction H when adding a logo
- Keep logos at 20–25% of QR width for safe scanning
- Add a few px of white padding around the logo
- Test the branded QR on 3+ phones before printing
- Prefer flat SVG/PNG logos over photographs
A well-branded QR can carry your visual identity into the offline world — use it.