Choosing a color that still scans
"Green QR code" or "blue QR code" is entirely doable — the dot color picker takes any hex value, not just the six presets shown by default. What determines whether it actually scans isn't which colors you pick, it's how much contrast sits between them. A dark green on white reads perfectly; a mid-tone green on a mid-tone gray background is where cameras start to struggle, especially at a distance or under bad lighting.
A simple test that works without any special tools: squint at the code, or view it in grayscale (most phones have an accessibility filter for this). If the dots and background still look clearly different from each other once color is stripped away, the contrast is almost certainly high enough.
Round, circular and minimalist styles
"Round" and "minimalist" QR code requests are usually asking for the same thing: softer, rounded modules instead of hard black squares. The Rounded and Extra-Rounded dot styles here do exactly that, keeping the underlying grid structure scanners expect while softening the visual edges.
A fully circular QR code — the whole symbol cropped into a circle rather than a square — isn't part of the QR standard, and most scanner software is tuned to expect a square finder pattern in the corners. Rounding the dots gets the same softer aesthetic without that risk; cropping the whole code into a circle is the one style choice we'd actively steer away from.
Transparent and custom-background QR codes
Toggling Transparent under Background removes the background fill entirely, rather than trying to fake transparency with a color — the exported SVG or PNG genuinely has no backing rect, so it composites cleanly on top of another design, a colored poster, or a product photo. JPEG can't carry transparency at all (the format has no alpha channel), so a JPEG export always falls back to solid white regardless of the toggle — pick SVG or PNG if transparency is the point.
A solid custom background (not transparent, just a color other than white) works the same way as the dot color: any hex value, contrast against the dots is what determines whether it scans.
Matching a brand palette without breaking scannability
The most reliable way to color-match a brand without risking scan failure is to pick the darkest color in the palette for the dots and pair it with the lightest — usually white or near-white — for the background, rather than trying to use two brand colors of similar depth against each other. A navy-on-white or forest-green-on-white code reads as clearly on-brand as it needs to while keeping the same contrast margin a plain black-on-white code has.
If a brand genuinely calls for two mid-tone colors together, test that combination specifically before committing to it at scale — generate the code, view it in grayscale, and confirm the two colors still look distinguishable once color itself is removed from the comparison. This one check catches the large majority of brand-color combinations that look fine in a design mockup but would struggle to scan reliably once printed or displayed on a screen with imperfect calibration.
