Guides

vCard QR codes for business cards

A vCard QR code is a contact written into the symbol. The person who scans it can save your name, phone, email, company, and title in one tap. The card they save is a copy of whatever you typed that day. It does not update itself later.

Updated 28 October 2026

What the tool writes

The vCard tab on the QRazyQR homepage asks for five fields: full name, phone, email, organization, and title. Name is required. The others are optional, and a blank box is omitted from the file rather than saved as an empty line. The payload is a version 3.0 vCard, which current iPhones and Android phones still import. For a person named Priya Raman at Northwind Studio it looks like this:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
FN:Priya Raman
N:Raman;Priya;;;
TEL:+1-555-0100
EMAIL:priya@example.com
ORG:Northwind Studio
TITLE:Director
END:VCARD

FN is the display name, the full string you typed. N is the structured name contact apps use for sorting. QRazyQR treats the last word as the family name and everything before it as the given name. “Priya Raman” becomes family Raman, given Priya. “Mary Anne Smith” becomes given “Mary Anne” and family “Smith”, which is what you want. A single name such as “Prince” is stored with an empty family name and the whole string as the given name. If a phone then files the contact under a blank surname, type the name as given name then family name, even if that feels formal.

There is no address field, no website field, and no photo. Do not hide a URL inside the job title. If the thing you want people to open is a page, make a URL code as well, or instead. Two small codes on a card — one contact, one link — scan more reliably than one code stuffed with every fact you can think of. Longer text forces a denser symbol, and a denser symbol needs to be printed larger. That tradeoff is the subject of the print and error-correction guide.

A printed contact is a snapshot

Static means the ink is the data. When you change your number or your title, every card already in a drawer is wrong, and it stays wrong. QRazyQR cannot edit it later, because the site never stored it. That is the same reason the code has no scan limit and no expiry: there is no account holding it hostage.

If your phone number changes every few months, a vCard on cotton paper is the wrong object. Put a URL you control on the card, and keep the current contact on that page. You will reprint less often. A “dynamic” QR product offers the same idea by encoding the vendor’s short link instead of your contact. Read static versus dynamic before you pay for that. The short version: the poster becomes a billboard for someone else’s domain, and the contact dies if they turn the redirect off. A page on your own site does not have that particular failure.

For a role that is stable — a studio director, a shop, a practice — a vCard is the better scan. The person gets a real contact, not a browser tab they meant to save and didn’t.

What to leave out

Anything in the code will be offered for saving into someone’s address book, and address books get backed up, synced, and sometimes exported. Use a work email and a work number. Leave personal numbers off even if there is no field trying to tempt you. The organization line is enough to say where you work. You do not need a home address, and the tool will not ask for one.

Titles go stale faster than names. If you are about to reprint for a promotion, wait until the title is final. A box of cards with the old title is not a draft you can patch.

Printing it on a card

A standard business card is 85–90 mm wide. The symbol itself wants about 20–25 mm on the shortest side, plus a quiet zone of blank paper around it, roughly four modules wide. Do not bleed the code to the cut edge. Cutters wander, and a module sliced in half is damage the error correction may or may not forgive. Level M, the default, is a reasonable choice for a clean card. Level Q is the safer pick if the card will live in a wallet and pick up scuffs. Level H makes the code denser. On a small card, denser can mean “harder to scan,” not “tougher.” Generate both and scan the proofs.

Download SVG for the printer, not a screenshot of the preview. The preview is drawn small so it fits the page. The SVG is vectors. If the printer only accepts PNG, set the size slider high — 1024 or above — so the modules stay crisp when the file is placed at card size. The PNG is snapped to a whole number of pixels per module, so the file can be a few pixels under the slider number. That is intentional. Soft module edges are how scans fail.

Dark card stock is the usual place this goes wrong. Navy modules on a navy card have no contrast. Set the background to white in the generator and leave that white rectangle visible on the card, larger than the modules by the quiet zone. Do not place the code on a photograph, a gradient, or a foil pattern. The color guide shows why. Put your name in type on the front of the card even if the code is there too. A phone with a dead battery, or a person who simply does not want to scan, should still be able to read who you are.

Test the save, not just the beep

Scan with an iPhone and with an Android phone before you approve a print run. The camera should offer to add a contact. Open the draft and check every field: given name, family name, phone, email, company, title. Some Android skins drop TITLE on import even when it is present in the text. If the preview of the raw code shows the title and the contact app omits it, the phone is the limitation. You can still keep the title in the code for apps that honor it.

Call the number from the saved contact, or at least compare it digit by digit. A transposed digit is the most expensive typo in this whole process, and the symbol will reproduce it perfectly. QRazyQR does not see the vCard — it is built in the browser — so a proof scan is the only review the file will ever get. If a field comes out scrambled and the steps above do not explain it, email contact@qrazyqr.com with the phone model and which fields you filled in. You do not need to send a private number. A description is enough.