Links for print: what to do before the file goes to the printer

Print is the only medium that cannot be patched. Everything else you ship can be edited after somebody points out the mistake; 10,000 flyers cannot. So the decisions worth taking care over are the ones made in the twenty minutes before the file goes to the printer, and there are four of them.

One: encode a link you control, never the destination

A QR code that contains https://shop.example.com/campaigns/autumn-2026/landing?utm_source=flyer is a photograph of today's site structure. When the campaign folder is archived, every copy in the world points at a 404.

A QR that contains https://gc.mw/aut points at a row in a database that you can edit. The paper never changes; the answer does.

This is the entire case for dynamic codes, and it is not a marketing distinction. It is the difference between print being an asset and print being a liability with a shelf life.

Two: size it by distance, not by taste

The working rule is ten to one. Take the distance at which somebody will realistically scan and divide by ten to get the minimum width of the symbol.

Table card at 30 cm: 3 cm. Shelf talker at 50 cm: 5 cm. A2 poster read from 3 m: 30 cm. Vehicle livery read from 8 m: 80 cm, which is why most van QR codes do not work and everyone pretends otherwise.

Then leave the quiet zone, four modules of blank space on all four sides, per ISO/IEC 18004. Designers remove it constantly because it looks like wasted margin. It is the part that tells the scanner where the symbol ends.

Three: print the link too, and make it typeable

Whatever the code says, some readers will type instead. Give them something they can hold in their head between seeing the poster and unlocking their phone.

gc.mw/aut is nine characters. Our alphabet drops 0, O, I and l, so nothing on the poster can be misread as something else, the four glyphs responsible for almost every mistyped URL are simply not in the set. On a paid plan a custom alias lets you use a word, which is better still.

Set it in a size somebody can read from the same distance the QR is meant to work at. A code sized for a 3 m poster under 8 pt type is two different design decisions pretending to be one.

A worked example

A furniture retailer printed 12,000 catalogue inserts with gc.mw/sofa and a 3 cm QR.

Six weeks in, the range sold out and the destination was re-pointed to the replacement collection. No reprint, no apology, no dead link, and the click count carried straight across the change, so the before-and-after comparison sat in one chart.

The numbers that mattered were the two they could only get because scans and clicks are recorded separately. The QR took roughly 70% of the traffic; the typed link took 30%, which was far higher than anyone predicted and justified keeping the printed URL in the layout for the next run.

That split exists because the QR encodes the link with a ?qr marker, so a scan and a click are different events rather than one total. Without it, the argument about whether to keep printing the URL would have been settled by opinion.

Four: never print a link that can expire

Anonymous links last 30 days. Free-account links last 365. Neither belongs on anything that goes through a printing press.

Paid links do not expire, and a lapsed link holds its code for a 90-day grace period so restoring it is a click rather than a reprint. Before a print run, confirm which plan the link was created on. It is a ten-second check that prevents the most expensive failure in this whole page.

Generate the print asset

For a link you already own, gc.mw/aut.svg is the print-ready vector and gc.mw/aut.svg?fg=1a1a2e&bg=ffffff sets the colours. For Wi-Fi credentials, a phone number or a vCard the tool above renders a static code in your browser with nothing uploaded, appropriate for a code taped inside a cupboard, wrong for a code on a customer's table.

The QR code product page covers logos and error correction, and branded links covers the aliases that make a printed URL worth typing.