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Certificate design

Table of contents

1. What your certificate looks like [edit]

2. Text options [edit]

3. Design options [edit]

What your certificate looks like [edit]

There are two aspects to what your certificate looks like:

  1. The text that will appear on it – controlled by the text options settings
  2. Design features such as borders and watermarks – controlled by the design options settings

Text options [edit]

The text options control the text that you display on the certificate.

An image of a labelled certificate as described below

The main options of interest are:

  1. Print date and date format – this controls which date gets printed on the certificate and the format of the date
  2. Print grade and grade format – this controls whether a grade is printed on the certificate and what format it is in
  3. Print code – when a certificate is generated it has a unique code associated with it. This code is saved and can be viewed in the certificate report. It can also be printed on the certificate to allow for validity checking
  4. Custom text – it is possible to put a small amount of custom text onto the certificate. This is put in the bottom left of the certificate.

Design options [edit]

The effects in the images below are created through the Border image setting

An image of a certificate design An image of a certificate design

  1. This is Fancy1-black
  2. This is Fancy2-black

These effects are also available in blue, brown or green.

For a different look, you can choose to only have Border lines, with the Border image set to No, again these lines can be black, brown, blue or green. This would look like the image below.

An image of a certificate with border lines

Or you can choose to use both border lines and border image and your certificate will look like this.

An image of a certificate using border lines and border image

You can select a watermark image, if you want one,  which appears behind the text. There are two watermarks available

1. Crest

2. Fleur de lis

Image of a certificate with a crest watermark

Image of a certificate with a fleur de lis watermark

The last two design options are to include a signature and a seal. These appear on the certificate on the bottom left and bottom right of the certificate respectively. For the signature, you can currently select to have a line (which could provide a space for a signature on a printed out certificate) and a demonstration signature. 

We do not recommend that you use the latter! Similarly, we do not recommend that you use the current options provided for the seal. These are currently all very basic and “clip-arty” and are unlikely to add gravitas to your certificate!

It is not possible to customise the design elements on a course level, e.g. to upload your own watermark image. It is possible to set the design components site wide, e.g. a custom watermark which would be available to all QMplus users. If the format of the certificates is causing you an issue, get in touch with us on elearning@qmul.ac.uk and we can discuss other possibilities.