Saying your address out loud and printing it
An address that only ever gets tapped can be almost anything. One you have to say down a phone line, or send to a printer, has to survive both.
The telephone test
Say your address to someone on a call and watch what they type. That is the whole test, and it is unkind in a useful way. Doubled letters fail first: nobody hears whether annaross has one n or two, and spelling it out takes longer than the rest of the sentence. Hyphens fail next, because a hyphen has to be named, and dash competes with dot for the same slot in the listener’s head.
Numbers that could be words are the third failure. Studio4you arrives on paper as studiofouryou about half the time, and only one of the two is yours. The last is the ending itself: when a domain is unfamiliar, people hear an ordinary word and put the dot in the wrong place. Nothing fixes that except saying it slowly once and letting the written version carry it.
On a card, a van, a receipt, a window
Print flattens everything. On a business card the address sits near the bottom in small type, competing with a phone number for the same glance, and short wins because short can be set larger. On the side of a van it is read at speed from twenty metres, which is a different problem: at that distance a hyphen vanishes and two words run together.
A receipt is the friendliest surface. The customer is holding it and can copy the address later without anyone watching. A shop window sits between the two extremes: read from a metre away, often by someone who will not stop to type. That is where a short address and a code together beat either alone.
Case is for the reader, not the machine
A web address is case-insensitive, so AnnaRoss.tapmy.link and annaross.tapmy.link open the same page. The choice is therefore purely typographic. Two words joined together read much faster with a capital at the seam, so use capitals in print wherever they help the eye, keep it lowercase where the type is already clear, and stop worrying about a visitor getting it wrong. They cannot.
When a code belongs beside the text
A QR code is right wherever the reader cannot type: a poster passed at walking pace, a table card, a badge at a stand, a slide seen from the back of a room. It is right on packaging, where hands are busy and the phone is already out. In all of those the code does the work and the line underneath only says where it goes.
It is wrong where the text is easier. On a business card a code eats a quarter of the surface to do what a legible address already does. In an email signature it is useless, because the reader is holding the device that would scan it. A code printed with nothing beside it asks people to trust an unreadable square, and many will not. Print both, and let the reader pick.
Signatures, descriptions, and print you cannot recall
An email signature is the highest-traffic place most people never edit. One line with the address, no logo, no image a mail client will strip, and it travels into every reply and every forward. A video description is the same idea in another room: the first line is what shows before the more link, so the address goes there rather than in a paragraph.
Then there is the print run. Two thousand cards, a van wrap, a sign above a door — none of them can be edited, and they outlive whatever platform decisions you make this year. That is the whole argument for an address that stays yours. On tapmy.link a rename leaves the old address redirecting to the new one, and a freed name stays parked instead of going to a stranger, so a card printed two years ago still lands where it should.
- Say it aloud to someone who has never seen it written, and let them type it.
- Check for doubled letters, hyphens and numbers that sound like words.
- Read it at the distance the print will really be read from.
- Set the case for legibility, then use that version everywhere.
- Decide whether a code earns its space, and never print a code on its own.
- Confirm the address is yours and will stay yours before the run starts.