Designing Documents People Have to Trust

A certificate is read by strangers years after you print it. Almost everything that makes it credible is decided at layout time.

The documents a centre issues — grade sheets, admit cards, certificates — are the only part of the system most people will ever see. They are also the part that gets photographed, faxed, photocopied and scanned at a bad angle, then read by somebody with no context and no way to ask you a question.

That argues for a plain layout with a fixed skeleton: the issuing body and the document type unmissable at the top, the student's identity in one block, the result in another, and the serial and date in the same corner on every document you have ever issued. Ornament is not what makes a certificate look official; consistency is.

Two details repay the effort. Print the serial in a form a human can read aloud over a phone, and keep a log of every issue and re-issue against the record. A duplicate that carries the same serial as the original, marked as a duplicate, ends an argument that an unnumbered reprint would start.