The code for “https://unique.rzen.dev/”, drawn by qrsticks. Image: qrsticks.greg.technology.

A QR code in which every black module is a stick figure, and which your phone still reads.

Type a sentence or a URL, press Draw it, and in under a second you have a square of tumbling stick figures: some leaping, some sprawled, some waving. The three corner squares stay solid, as does the small alignment marker on larger codes. The rest is doodle.

The page explains why it works, in a short paragraph. A decoder finds the three big corner squares, stretches an invisible grid between them, and checks only the dead center of each cell. Everything around those center points is ignored. So long as the drawing puts ink on the dark centers and leaves the light ones blank, the code scans, and the figures can do whatever they like in between.

It holds up. The page’s own example, “wait, this scans?”, and the code above, drawn for this site’s address, both decode correctly with a standard QR detector.

Press Draw it again for the same text and you get a different scribble. Each drawing has its own address, in the form qrsticks.greg.technology/?text=…&seed=…, so a particular one can be shared. Download! saves it as a PNG.

The limits are small. Input is capped at 150 characters. Drawing happens on the maker’s server rather than in your browser, and the tool is rate limited.

The page says it was heavily inspired by Noel Friedrich’s hand-drawn QR code, and it is made by Greg Technology. Its FAQ answers the obvious question: “Will you ever charge for this service, or somehow make urls go to some other urls, holding them hostage?” The reply is “No, QR codes should always be free.”