Certificates & Awards

Carl Shank • September 10, 2022

Designing Certificates and Awards

Everyone likes to be recognized for a job well done or for a special milestone accomplished. We can do this, in part, through certificates and award papers that are then framed and given to the recipient. However, there is not much thought through design given to the standard certificate. Preprinted certificate papers with fancy border designs help, but the typesetting and layout in the heart of the certificate often lacks power or pizzazz. In Example one below, I redid a certificate given to me by an employer, NCDAmerica, which is a church health consulting firm in Michigan. I have been licensed through them since 1998 and specialize in church consultations in the Northeast. You will note how I redid the layout and design below.


Certificates usually have eight or nine standard elements — (1) Name of presenter; (2) Title; (3) Name of recipient; (4) Reason for the presentation; (5) Term of membership or certification (if applicable); (6)Date presented; (7) Signatures of presenter or presenter's agent; (8) Presenter's logo or seal; and (9) Presenter's city and state. Chuck Green in John McWade's excellent Before & After magazine (Vol. 4, No. 4 / 1995) gives ample clues as to content and design of certificates and awards. I have designed some certificates for NCDAmerica, a church health consulting firm, originally in Germany and based in several countries. Note the examples below.

Successful Layout & Design

More On The Greek Font

By Carl Shank • December 23, 2025
More on the Greek font. In a previous post ( It's Greek To Me! March 18, 2023) we noted that Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Robert Bringhurst notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." ( Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005 , pp. 274, 278) In fact, asking Google for the best Greek face to use, it points us to Porson Greek. Porson is a beautiful Unicode Font for Greek. It's not stiff, like many of the cleaner fonts, which are usually san serif. It is bold and easy to read and seems to more closely match the orthography in newer textbooks. (Jan 8, 2004) 

Newest Decorative Font: Nabel Dado

By Carl Shank • December 22, 2025
CARE Typography is pleased to announce a new typeface — NabelDado — in standard black-and-white font formulation as well as colored SVG formats. Please see samples below. Order from cshanktype@gmail.com. Enjoy!
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