Work · Built in-house · Reprint nothing
You can't reprint a van
A QR code on a vehicle, a leaflet or a site board is permanent in a way the web never is. Rename one landing page and every printed code pointing at it is dead. The usual fixes are worse than the problem.
Define
Print is permanent and the web is not. Change a campaign, move a booking link, rename a page, and every code already printed stops working. The common response is to avoid printing codes at all, which wastes the advertising surface a trades business already owns and has already paid for.
The other common response is a free generator, which is worse. Whoever makes the code owns the redirect, and they own it after the code is on five hundred leaflets and a van. They can put a page in front of the destination, sell advertising on it, begin charging, or simply let the code expire. The business finds out when a customer mentions it.
Evaluate
Nothing may sit between the scan and the destination. No interstitial, no holding page, no advertising, no counter screen. The redirect belongs to the client, which is the only arrangement under which nobody can ever insert something into that gap later and charge for it.
The redirect must be temporary, not permanent. A permanent redirect is cached by the browser and by every proxy between it and the server. The destination would become unchangeable in practice, which is precisely the problem the system exists to solve.
Print tolerances are not screen tolerances. Codes going onto physical things get scuffed, curved, rained on and partly covered, so error correction is set high on every code even though it makes them denser.
Execute
Every code is a redirect under our control. The printed code never changes; where it points can change as often as needed. Codes come out as vector for print, sharp at any size from a business card to a vehicle wrap, and as raster at any resolution for everything else. Each one counts its scans, and scan addresses are hashed daily rather than stored, so counting a repeat visitor is possible and identifying one is not.
Testing found the defect that mattered. The white border around a code, which is what lets a scanner find its edges, had been built to a quarter of the width the specification calls for. At that width a code reads perfectly on a screen and then fails off a printed leaflet with artwork butted against it. It would have been discovered after a print run.
Deliver
Live, in use, and host-aware from the first line, which means a client's codes can be served from the client's own domain with our name nowhere on their printed material. The routing for that is built. The certificate arrangement for third-party domains is the remaining piece.
Client
Fraher Digital. Named with permission.