Tobacco, cats and QR codes

Wervik is Belgium’s tobacco town. The leaf has grown there since 1654, and by the end of the last century 98 percent of Belgian tobacco came from the region. The National Tobacco Museum tells that story, and since 2023 a visit starts in a renewed tourist welcome centre designed by Pièce Montée: museum desk and tourist office in one, with a big map of the Westhoek, a wall of famous locals and a row of panels covering two thousand years of town history in bite-sized facts.

One detail: all of those texts are in Dutch. And Wervik sits right on the French border.

In February 2023 Rik Jacques of Pièce Montée sent an email: could we build something that generates a QR code per text, leading to that same text in translation? “Sounds like your kind of thing”, he added. He was right.

Eighteen minutes later there was a proposal: a small CMS where the team manages the translated texts, and where every page comes with a QR code of its own. In vector format, ready for the printer.

Could those QR codes point to PDFs? They could, but we advised against it. A PDF downloads, stays on your device and doesn’t reflow. Starting your twentieth panel on an almost full phone is nobody’s idea of a good time. A web page simply scrolls, loads fast and leaves nothing behind.

So pages it was. Twenty-eight stories, each in English and French.

The design came from Pièce Montée and fitted in one sentence: yellow background, two typefaces, two sizes. Sometimes the best briefing is a short one.

The content is less restrained. You read about Kattenknippeling and the Coal Bag Procession, about 1713 when Wervik was cut in two, about the local dialect, and about famous residents from artist Wim Delvoye to comedian Wouter Deprez. For the record: these days the jar in the cat-smacking game holds a toy cat. It says so in both languages.

In the admin the team creates a page, publishes it and downloads the QR code. No middle step, no ticket to us. We passed on one rule: once a code is printed, don’t change the title or the address of that page. Paper on a panel is patient; a broken link is not.

The go-ahead came on 2 March 2023. On 7 March the first version was online. In early May the welcome centre opened its doors, and visitors have been scanning their way through the history of Wervik ever since. The system is still running.

This wasn’t the only project with the scenographers from Ghent. We also built their own portfolio site and worked together on Expedition Testerep, a cycling app for the Belgian coast. They make the room; we make the thing in your hand.