I’ve been fascinated by the versatility of QR codes for a while, but I have been unimpressed by their complete lack of human-readable information.  The recipient rarely has a good indication of where a QR code will take them, so I am generally reluctant to scan any random code I see. 

After reading this post on Hack a Day about putting logos into QR codes, I decided to make job-hunting tools out of QR codes modified to be human readable.  The trick is that QR codes contain a lot of redundant data for error correction, up to 30% of the code’s area can be covered up and it will still remain a readable code. That allows you to provide some human readable information, a logo, or other fun graphic element.

I decided to create two job hunting tools: a QR code resume card and a QR code business card. 

My business card uses the bubbly erlenmeyer flask logo from my chemhacker project as a personal logo. When scanned, the business card (printed at standard US business card size) adds a vCard with my contact information and a link to simple switch labs to the recipient’s contact list.

When scanned, my resume card (printed on a standard 3x5 card) takes the user to a special URL I’ve created that contains my contact info and a PDF version of my resume. The resume card uses a paper-and-star icon which is also used in the special contact info URL, for consistency.

To create these documents, I used this excellent QR code generating website to create scaled vector graphics, and then I created the business and resume card layouts and logos in Inkscape.

Note: no, that’s not a mistake-- all the QR codes photographed in this post point to the same place: simpleswitchlabs.com, to protect my personal information.