Certificate sizes and dimensions (a simple guide)

Get the size right and your certificate prints crisp and shares cleanly. Get it wrong and you end up with stretched text or a blurry export. The good news: there are only a couple of standards to know.

The two standard sizes

• A4 — 210 x 297 mm (8.27 x 11.69 in). The international standard, used almost everywhere outside North America.
• US Letter — 8.5 x 11 in (216 x 279 mm). The North American standard.

Pick based on where most of your recipients are. If they might print the certificate, matching their local paper size avoids awkward margins. If it'll only ever live on a screen, either works.

Orientation

Landscape is the traditional, expected orientation for certificates — it gives the recipient's name room to breathe and reads as formal. Portrait is fine for modern, minimal designs but is less conventional.

Resolution for print

For anything that might be printed, design at 300 DPI. At that resolution an A4 landscape certificate is roughly 3508 x 2480 pixels. Designing too small and scaling up later is what causes blurry, pixelated certificates.

Setting it up

Build your background at the final size and orientation, then place your text fields on top. Certificatory exports at Full HD and outputs a clean PDF, so what you design is what your recipients download — no surprise resizing.