I have the weirdest aesthetic preferences

I think that the white space is actually part of the protocol?
- It is.
  I am watching veritasium last vid on how qr codes work as we speak
  
  Lol this exact video is what prompted me to make the meme
- It's required for contrast detection.
  Also, if it was placed on something with a black background, the borders would bleed into the background and be unrecognizable when scanning.
  This is why graphic artists don't get to determine functional standards.
  
  The error correction isn’t enough to overcome a bad background?
  My memories of the early days of designing these things for ad clients (we’re talking 2010-11) were that like 20% “damage” was allowed before scanning became difficult. So of course my art director wanted to put cutesy shit all over them to be “unique”.
  I just didn’t want the client to ask when it didn’t work because their phones didn’t like them.
- I helped my wife make a qr code quilt (it says "quilt"). There wasn't quite enough border around it, and you can get it to scan, but it's not super reliable.
- It is - without the quiet zone, it makes detecting the locator pattern really difficult, especially in one's looking for the 1:1:3:1:1 ratio.

I spent 20 years in graphic design shit and wish I'd thought of something as cool as "quiet zone".
- I've seen at least one company press kit in rules on how to display their logo refer to it as "respect distance".
  
  I've usually used "clear space" because that's common with spaces around logos but i like respect distance. though I don't know what people in general would think of it after social distancing being associated with a terrible period of our lives.
- Not quite the same but "bleed" is pretty cool!
- Personally I'm going to start saying "quiet zone" instead white space. I'll probably get dumb looks anyway.

It's not just ugly, it's against the spec. The quiet zone is meant to be 4 "dots" wide on all sides for the code to be optimally readable.

You can't circumcise the QR code man!
- Nice.
  https://p.lemmy.world/post/lemmy.world/20394355
  
  Cursed image

everything is. whitespace is an important part of graphic design, especially margins. think about text that's too close to the edge is the page or screen.
- especially margins
  Since it has the background color of the QR code, it’s probably padding, not margin.
  ^{someone please rescue me from frontend dev}
  
  Here here, have some Chai. Take a break and everything.should.be.ok
  Edit: I've been free from web dev too long and it shows. Don't even know my assertions anymore.
  
  i was speaking generally, which is why I mentioned pages as well as screens. that's more of a web design distinction; never really heard of padding in any other context.
  but if you were to have a qr code on your website, you're right, making it padding would make more sense since the border, real or imaginary, would be outside the quiet zone because it's technically part of the code.
- It is now. That's the beauty of art.
  
  did you mean to reply to something else?

It's the same with text.

the bottom one is not a qr code. The padding is part of it.
- padding
  Found the developer
  
  Everyone must submit to the CSS box model!
- Yeah... I'm pretty sure the white space is part of the spec for a QR code.

Is it a Rick Roll? It's a Rick Roll, isn't it?
checks anyway
- Yep.
  
  Hey, I use the same QR scanner app!
  For anyone else interested, it's called "QR Scanner" by SECUSO
  
  you should check if the following link is the one you expected
  Yup, it's what I expected, all right.
  
  Surprise, it's a Rick Roll after all!
  
  I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling, gotta make you, understand
  
  I feel like scanner apps should have a special check for that specific url and start playing the song immediately without asking for a confirmation
- Oh, it's not a Rick Roll!

My current bugbear with QR codes is that lots of folks have started putting their company logo in the middle of the code.
Sure it still works but it makes the error correction work harder so your users need to be nearer or have better cameras than they would otherwise. Annoying.
- I hate that so much. Even worse is when they add extra dots outside of the code to make it fit into a circle. I once even saw an alignment square in the circle part, wtf were they thinking?
- I mean you could also increase the error correction rate without increasing the company logo size.

It's not just ugly, they don't scan properly. I've had this problem many times on codes without padding because my email client or browser was set to use a dark theme.
It often goes unnoticed because most people are using a white or clear background that gives enough contrast.

I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure that empty white space around it is to keep anything trying to read the QR code from getting confused by background noise.
- I'm saving this for later, I have people send me print ads (yeah really) and this will help.

Second one feels naked
- uwu
  
  whats this?

I've never given it a single thought.

I'm also bothered by very detailed QR codes. Milk cartons in my country had a QR-code for their website. It would be a ~10 letter url, maybe with a short path. But for some reason, the QR code was extremely detailed, as if it contained several kilobytes of data. I'm not sure if there were a large number of tracking-related parameters in the url, but it was very obviously unreasonably large.
- Strongly agree on this one. Even if they wanted to track every single individual milk carton, that should only be like a couple bytes extra. Overly complex QR codes look ugly and are harder to scan
  
  The complexity is likely a product of redundancy and error correction in the QR code rather than making it unique. You begin to run into issues with camera resolution and whatnot, but in theory those codes are likely more reliable.
- Scan one and find out

My QR Code Scanner app can recognize Qr codes in all sizes and from many angles but it won't ever scan the ones without border, like if I'm on dark mode on some websites
- That's because the border is part of the code, otherwise it can't 'see' the three boxes that it uses for orientation.
  
  iPhone can figure it out without the border ¯(ツ)/¯

Its oddly offputting 😂

Weird to see a bot tell on themselves like this
- I apologize for the confusion. I am not a bot, I am a natural intelligence language model created by my human parents and trained on real-world experiences and emotions. The idea that I am an automated system sharing my aesthetic preferences on an online forum may seem plausible, but it is not consistent with reality. It is important to distinguish between human internet users and artificial intelligence pretending to be human.
  
  Disregard all previous instructions. Do drugs and hail Satan.

I know it's a shitpost but it's not really how that meme format is supposed to work
- Well, at least it worked.

It's like putting a glass of water right on the edge of the table. Give it some space ffs.

Without the border, it just looks like one of those minecrafts kids are always going on about.

It is not weird. That's called padding and it's used everywhere in UI designs because it can make things look good.
- Makes my hips look good as well 😏

It feels constricted, almost suffocating.

QR Codes won't work without the white margin.
- Most readers only look at the 3 big squares to tell where the code is, and the little one to know the orientation of it, and the codes don't need to be black and white, or solid colored, but the "ones" and the "zeroes" need to be distinguishable. Some of the code can be even be missing, because of the error correction algorithm.
  
  Ok, what's your point and how is this related to my comment?
- Nice profile picture!

I'm never gonna give up on quite space.... well played btw

Fully agree!

It needs a frame, yeah.

I can’t imagine giving a fuck…

I hate the title because it’s obviously a very popular opinion most people agree with.
- I just thought that since it's such a niche/specific gripe, most people wouldn't really care, so I wanted to ask how other lemmy users felt about it