People who are familiar with the conventional barcodes know that the print needs to be very precise, and damage to the printed bars will easily render the code unreadable to scanners. Many people probably think, in a similar way, QR Codes need to be quite precisely printed. They almost always appears as black print on a white background, with reasonable amount of surrounding white space.
The truth is that QR Codes are designed to be quite robust. Parts of the code could be missing, smudged, or there could be extra markings, but can still remain perfectly readable. (You can read QR Codes from varying angles too, and even from a reversed image.)
But so far, no one purposely prints a deteriorated QR Code. At least, I’ve not come across one until now.
This QR Code, pictured above, is printed with black, green and purple on a white background. Edges that are supposed to be straight and right-angled are now curved. Best yet, there are several cute little horses printed on the code.
This modified QR Code, however, remains perfectly readable by QR Code scanners. Nice.