If you have been looking to create a QR code for your restaurant that is fully customizable to your restaurant brand and doesn’t have any advertisements or barely any limitations, look no further.
I found a great free QR code generator called QR Code Monkey. It lets fully customize the QR code’s colors, style and you even get to upload your logo so that it shows in the QR code.
Very cool stuff.
How To Generate A Free QR Code Without Ads
Go to https://www.qrcode-monkey.com/#url and select the type of destination you want:
For a simple link to your menu, you can choose URL.
Then, you can customize your QR code so that it is branded by you. Other QR code generators charge you for customizing where QR Code Monkey doesn’t. That’s why I chose QR Code Monkey over the other QR code generators.
First, choose which URL destination you want the QR code to send people to when scanned. Make sure to enter http:// or https:// in the beginning of your link or else QR Code Monkey won’t recognize it as a valid link and will ask you to add http:// or https:// when you try to generate the QR code:
Next, you can set the colors of the QR code. You can choose the color of the QR code itself, the background color of the QR code, then click on Create QR Code to preview what your QR code will look like.
Here’s another variation with a dark background:
Notice how they tell you if you don’t have enough contrast between the foreground and background colors. If there isn’t enough contrast, then some phones or cameras might not read the QR code correctly.
You can play around with the colors, but I’m going to switch back to the previous colorset I had before.
After you set your colors, you can add your logo image:
Then preview the QR code after you upload your image. One thing that QR Code Monkey doesn’t tell you is if your image is too low resolution.
If your image is too low resolution, the preview will look okay, but when you download the QR code, the logo will be blurry like below:
The resolution of the logo that came out blurry was 70×70 px whereas the non-blurry version I downloaded was 800×800 px.
Also, I tried to use their Remove Background Behind Logo Feature but it didn’t work for me. There was still white space behind the logo where I think if the background were removed, it will show pure QR code.
Lastly, you can choose the shapes and styles of how the QR code shows:
I color coded the styles and how they appear on the actually QR code image.
There are 3 different stylings to choose from and honestly I just had fun with choosing these styles. If you think your brand is more bubbly, you can choose more circular styles. If you think your brand is more serious, then you can choose boxy styles.
Before you download your QR code image, you can choose the resolution and file type.
It’s very safe to just choose the Highest Quality in case you want to print the QR code on a larger banner or poster.
Go ahead and download the QR code.
Is QR Code Monkey Safe?
I’ve been using QR code monkey for all of my restaurant clients and haven’t run into any issues at all. It works very consistently. It doesn’t look like they mine any data from your links.
Now that you have a QR code to your menu, where are you going to place it?
