QR Code Art Business Card

I made myself a design for a business card today.

Update Aug 1, 2023: Figured I’d move the write-up here, since there’s a good chance I might keep iterating on this in the future and don’t wanna spam the qr code page.

QR image generation #

The QR codes were generated quick and hackishly with one of the out-of-the-box QR code + image prompt generators¹. In particular, this thread lead me to this site, though I tried a few different QR image generators. See this directory for some examples.

Here’s a sample of some of the images I liked more², from maybe an hour or two of prompting:

At one point, I decided to try one of the example prompts shown on the QR Code Monster page. The output frankly looked way cooler than any of the prompts I had written.

Being wary of the color palatte potentially not printing well (and also the difficuly of integrating such a complex background texture into a cohesive business card, especially cause I didn’t feel like running an in-painting model), I played around with replacing the “orange” and “teal” in the original prompt until I eventually settled on the simple “black” and “white”.

Final prompt:

a holistic drawing of (pc cooling:1.2) (printed circuitboard:0.2), (stunning, highly detailed, 8k, ornate, intricate, cinematic, dehazed, atmospheric:0.7), splash art, white, (black:0.3), (by Jeremy Mann, by John Constable, by El Greco:0.7), (acrylic paint:0.4), (by Zdzislaw Beksinski:0.4), (by Victo Ngai and John Romita Jr:0.8)

Business Card Creation #

Bit of tweaking in GIMP later³ (including generating another image with the same prompt to use as the background) and we get the business card that hopefully (unless you came from the blog) lead you here.⁴

Since it seemed reasonable enough, I used Vista Print to physically print the cards. For those curious, that site charges ~$25 on top of the cost of the card if you want to ship faster (~1 week) and $9 for the default cheap option of ~2 weeks.

Update (roughly an hour after making this) #

I think I’ve realized the simpler answer here was probably to do QR art on the back side of a business card (letting it take up whatever space it needs), then have clean lines/text on the front.

Ah well, done is better the enemy of perfect, and there’ll always be more chances to print business cards. :P