I have the weirdest aesthetic preferences

I think that the white space is actually part of the protocol?

It's not just ugly, it's against the spec. The quiet zone is meant to be 4 "dots" wide on all sides for the code to be optimally readable.

I spent 20 years in graphic design shit and wish I'd thought of something as cool as "quiet zone".

everything is. whitespace is an important part of graphic design, especially margins. think about text that's too close to the edge is the page or screen.

You can't circumcise the QR code man!

the bottom one is not a qr code. The padding is part of it.

It's the same with text.

My current bugbear with QR codes is that lots of folks have started putting their company logo in the middle of the code.

Sure it still works but it makes the error correction work harder so your users need to be nearer or have better cameras than they would otherwise. Annoying.

Is it a Rick Roll? It's a Rick Roll, isn't it?

checks anyway

It's not just ugly, they don't scan properly. I've had this problem many times on codes without padding because my email client or browser was set to use a dark theme.

It often goes unnoticed because most people are using a white or clear background that gives enough contrast.

Second one feels naked

I've never given it a single thought.

I'm also bothered by very detailed QR codes. Milk cartons in my country had a QR-code for their website. It would be a ~10 letter url, maybe with a short path. But for some reason, the QR code was extremely detailed, as if it contained several kilobytes of data. I'm not sure if there were a large number of tracking-related parameters in the url, but it was very obviously unreasonably large.

My QR Code Scanner app can recognize Qr codes in all sizes and from many angles but it won't ever scan the ones without border, like if I'm on dark mode on some websites