Skip to main content
A design is a named look for your QR codes: colours, the shape of the dots, a logo in the middle. Designs belong to the organization and are set once; each workspace chooses which one its codes use, so the person making the poster chooses nothing and still gets it right.

​
Where designs live

Open Branding and scroll to QR code designs. It sits on the branding page because a design is the same thing as your brand — your logo and colours — applied to a different surface. See Client reports and branding for the rest of that page. Creating, editing and deleting a design needs the publishing capability, the same one that edits branding; so does choosing which design the workspace uses. Everyone in the workspace can download codes with the designs that exist. See Members and roles.

​
What a design covers

1

Colours

The dot colour, optionally with a second colour to make a gradient; the colour of the three large corner squares, which matches the dots when left blank; and the background colour, or no background at all.
2

Shapes

Dots can be square, rounded or circular. The corners have two shape controls, Corner frame and Corner centre; each can be square or rounded, and never circular: a reader finds the code by the sharp corners of those squares, and rounding barely disturbs that measurement while a circle removes enough of it that cheaper scanner apps stop finding the code.
3

Logo

A PNG or JPEG placed in the centre, masked square, rounded or circular, with a setting for how much of the code it covers.
4

Default download size

One of 256, 512, 1024 or 2048 pixels: the size the download panel opens at, which you can still change before downloading. A link whose code is too dense to print at that size opens at the smallest size it can be printed at.

​
Designs that would not scan are not saved

When you save a design, the console runs the same check it runs before any download (see QR codes for the refusals in full): enough contrast between the colours and the background, a logo within the share of the code a reader can afford to lose, and a logo clear of the squares a reader needs to find the code. A refusal names the setting responsible and the value that would work. The check is made against the smallest code this product can produce, which is the one with the least room in the middle. A design that saves therefore works for every link in the account, not only for the one that happened to be open.
The transparent-background switch in the QR panel overrides the design’s background for that download, and the panel then says which surfaces the code can be printed on.

​
Which design a workspace uses

Above the list of designs is a selector, This workspace uses. Pick a design, or Brand colours (no design). Two workspaces of the same organization can pick different designs. A workspace with no design chosen still gets branded codes: the dots take your brand’s primary colour and the corners its accent colour, as set higher up on the same page. An organization that has never touched the branding page gets UTMKit’s default brand colours: blue dots with orange corners, on white. Brand colours are chosen for a brand, not for a code, so the Branding page never asks whether they would scan. When they would not — an accent the same as the background, say — a code with no design quietly steps around it: it tries the primary colour alone, then falls back to UTMKit’s default colours, and keeps the first of the three that scans. Your saved branding is never changed by this. A design you create yourself gets no such fallback — see the previous section — because a design is a deliberate choice, and the console tells you at once if it would not scan.

​
Editing and deleting

Editing or deleting a design changes what the next download looks like and nothing else. A code already downloaded or printed is a picture of the short link; it keeps working exactly as it did, whatever happens to the design it was drawn with. The console says so before a deletion is confirmed.