What if a QR code could look like a maze, hand-drawn with MS Paint?
Inspired by Oscar Cunningham‘s excellent “working QR code in the style of Piet Mondrain” and Andrew Taylor‘s “logical extension of the idea”, earlier this week, I decided to extend upon my much-earlier efforts to (ab)use QR codes and throw together the disgusting thing you see above.
Here’s how I made it:
- Generated a QR code as usual, minimising its size by making the URL uppercase (allows a smaller character set to be used) and maximising its resilience by ramping up the error correction to the maximum.
- Masked off all but the central 7% of each row and column, leaving just a grid of spots, and then re-adding the three large and one small square and the “zebra crossing” stripes that connect the large squares, to ensure rapid discovery.
- With a pink mask in place to help me see where I was working, drew lines, dots, and whatever else I liked over the black spots but not touching the white ones, to build a maze.
- Removed the pink mask, leaving just black and white. Tested a bit.
Obviously this isn’t a clever idea for real-world scenarios. The point of QR codes’ resilience and error correction is to compensate for suboptimal conditions “in the field”, like reflections, glare, dust, grime, low light conditions, and so on.
But it’s kinda fun, right?