QRCodeStack Community

The problem worth solving here is not "how do I make a QR code". It is that people walk past your shop, like what they see, and have no way to keep it. Typing a handle into a phone in the street is enough friction to lose most of them. What to point it at Your public profile URL — instagram.com/yourhandle. Not a post, not a story, not a link-in-bio page. Someone standing outside your door wants the account, not a specific photo from last Tuesday. Static or dynamic? Both work. The question is whether you will ever want to change where it goes. Static encodes the profile URL directly. It works forever, needs no account, and can never be changed. Dynamic points at a short URL that redirects. You can change the destination later — to a campaign page during a sale, then back — and you can see how many people actually scanned it. If the code is going on a window sticker that stays up for two years, dynamic is worth it for the one time you want to redirect it without reprinting. Where it actually gets scanned At eye level near the door, not at knee height on the glass On the counter, where people wait anyway On the receipt or the bag, which travels home with them Not on a moving vehicle, and not on the floor Say what it is A bare code gets ignored. "Follow us" plus the code beats the code alone, every time. People scan when they know what they are getting. One honest caveat Scan counts are not follower counts. A dynamic code will tell you how many people scanned and roughly where from — it cannot tell you who followed, because that happens inside an app we have no visibility into. Compare your scan numbers against your follower growth over the same period and treat the gap as the cost of the handoff.

The short answer is a ratio, not a number: the code should be about one tenth of the distance it will be scanned from. Scanned from 30 cm (a table tent, a business card): 3 cm minimum Scanned from 1 m (a shop window, a counter sign): 10 cm Scanned from 3 m (a wall poster): 30 cm Scanned from 10 m (a banner, a vehicle): 1 m Treat those as floors, not targets. A code that is comfortably too big costs nothing; one that is 15% too small fails silently and you never hear about it. The three things that break a technically correct size The quiet zone. A QR code needs clear space around it — roughly four modules' worth, where a module is one of the little squares. Designers trim it constantly to fit a layout. A code with artwork crowding its edge fails at any size. Module size after printing. What matters physically is how big one module ends up. Below roughly 0.5 mm per module, ink spread on absorbent stock starts merging neighbouring modules. If your code encodes a lot of data it has more, smaller modules at the same overall size — which is one practical reason to point a code at a short URL rather than a long one. The surface. Curved bottles, textured card, anything laminated glossy under a shop light. Curvature distorts the grid; gloss throws back the light the camera needs. On a curved surface, go a size up and keep the code away from the steepest part of the curve. Test it the way a customer will Print one, at final size, on the final material. Then scan it: at the real distance, at an angle, in the actual lighting, on the oldest phone in the office. A code that works on your desk under a lamp tells you nothing about a rainy Tuesday outside a café. If you are printing a run of thousands, the ten minutes this takes is the cheapest insurance available.