Codes that work,
made in your browser.

CodeCraft is a set of free tools for making and reading the machine-readable codes that turn up on everything from restaurant tables to warehouse shelves. There are two families of them, and knowing which you need is most of the battle.

A barcode stores a short number in the widths of parallel lines. It is read by dedicated hardware — a till, a scanner gun, a sorting machine — and it has been the backbone of retail and logistics since the 1970s. A QR code stores data in a two-dimensional grid, holds thousands of characters instead of a dozen, and can be read by any phone camera from any angle. If a member of the public will scan it, you want a QR code. If a machine will scan it, you almost certainly want a barcode.

Everything runs in your browser

This is the design decision the whole site is built around. When you type a Wi-Fi password, a customer's phone number or an unreleased product code into most online generators, that data travels to someone else's server, gets processed there, and comes back as an image. What happens to it in between is a matter of trust.

CodeCraft does the work locally instead. The page loads, and from that point the encoding, rendering and file export all happen in JavaScript on your own machine. There is no upload step to opt out of, because there is no upload step. You can verify this: load a tool, disconnect from the internet, and keep working.

Static codes, and why that matters

Paid QR services usually give you a dynamic code: the image points at their server, which redirects to your real link. You get scan statistics and the ability to change the destination later. You also get a printed code that stops working the day your subscription lapses or that company folds, and a third party logging every scan.

CodeCraft makes static codes, where your destination is encoded directly into the pattern. Nothing sits in the middle, so nothing can break or start charging. If you want tracking without giving up control, point the code at a URL on your own domain with UTM parameters attached — the data lands in your own analytics and the code stays permanent.

Getting a code that actually scans

• Size it for the reading distance. A QR code should be roughly one tenth as wide as the distance it will be scanned from. Thirty centimetres away needs about three centimetres of code; three metres away needs thirty.
• Keep the quiet zone. The blank margin around a code is part of the specification, not decoration. Cropping it is the single most common cause of failure.
• Contrast beats colour. Scanners read brightness. Dark code on a light background is reliable; a mid-tone on another mid-tone is not, however good it looks on screen.
• Use SVG for print. It is vector, so it stays sharp at any size and every print shop accepts it.
• Test at the final size. Print one, scan it with two different phones, then run the job.

Each tool has a fuller guide on its own page — the QR generator covers error correction and logo placement in detail, and the barcode generator explains which of the sixteen formats belongs on which kind of label.