Starter templates give you a finished, professional design to begin from instead of a blank page. This article covers what ships in the gallery and how starters adapt to your brand.

The Gallery

When you click Add New on the Templates screen, the starter gallery opens. Three design families are included:

• Formal: A traditional design with serif typography, suited to diplomas and professional credentials.
• Modern: A clean, contemporary layout with strong color blocking.
• Playful: A lighter design suited to workshops, kids’ programs, and community achievements.

Each family comes in landscape and portrait, and every variant is available in both Letter and A4, so there are twelve ready-made starting points plus a Blank option. The gallery leads with the certificate size chosen in your Appearance settings.

Starters Adapt to Your Brand

Starter designs are parameterized rather than fixed artwork:

• Decorative artwork and shapes are vector layers tied to color roles. When you create a template from a starter, artwork mapped to the Primary and Accent roles recolors to the brand colors set in Certificates > Settings > Appearance, and text takes your Text color.
• Each starter includes a logo slot and a signature slot. If you have set a default logo and signature, they are placed automatically.
• The recipient name line is already a merge field, and a QR code linking to your verification page is already positioned.

Because backgrounds are vector shapes rather than baked-in images, they print crisply at full size and remain fully editable: select any part of the artwork to recolor, move, or delete it.

Starting from Blank

The Blank option creates an empty canvas at your default size. This is the right choice when you are recreating an existing paper certificate or building something unlike the starters. All the same elements are available; you are just starting from zero.

Iterating on Designs

Use the Duplicate action on the Templates list to copy an existing template, including everything on its canvas. This is the easiest way to build a family of related certificates that share a common design but differ in wording, artwork, or validity. If you only need the same design across many courses, you do not need a copy per course: one template with an “Any course” trigger and a course title merge field covers them all. See Awarding Certificates Automatically.

Remember that editing a template never changes certificates that have already been issued. You can refresh a design each season without affecting anyone’s earned credentials.