The team at VerifyEd™ is rolling out an update to our credential designer which makes it easier to use and allows you to create unique credentials for your learners.

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Why we’re updating our design tool

The credential designer is one of our most-used features - allowing institutions to truly represent themselves and the achievements of their learners. Since its launch a year ago, it has enabled many institutions across the world to create and issue attractive and trustworthy credentials.

Through conversations with our institutions and usability testing, we identified there were a number of areas to be improved to assist our users in their design efforts:

1. Making the designer more flexible
2. Providing a design interface which resembles the final credentials as closely as possible
3. Allowing deeper customisation of the elements we offer on the credential
4. Supporting differently shaped credentials

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Let’s talk about how we’ve accomplished that in this update.

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Flexible design

While we have already offered a simple drag-and-drop interface, our first-generation credential designer worked for basic credential designs. However, it was restricted by one simple thing; the designs all had to be in a linear layout. One element after another with no exceptions.

In order to make the designer flexible and to allow for more customisation, we reviewed the underlying architecture of the designer for it to work based on X and Y coordinates and real dimensions. This simple change has meant that you can now drag the elements anywhere within the design area.

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We also removed most of the restrictions on the resizing of elements. Now, you can control the size of your elements' height and width completely. For example, on images, we used to have small, medium and large presets. While this worked for most institutions, there would always be others who wanted a bit more wiggle room to fully accomplish their vision.

Visual indicators and guard-rails have also been added in place to ensure that elements can be easily center-aligned, and are contained within the credential design area. Overall, we have made the decisions around placement and sizing of elements now much more personal.

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Realistic previews

When you’re designing, you want to ensure that the final product resembles what you’ve designed as closely as possible. In our original credential designer, that sometimes wasn’t possible as elements like text inputs had toolbar interfaces included in their height, which meant when you came to preview the design, things jumped around.

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We have reviewed every single element you can add to the credential, and streamlined them as much as possible. Now when you preview your credential, there is almost zero difference between the design interface and the final credential. This will help institutions to provide more exceptional-looking achievements to their learners, improving shareability.

Customise every element

Our original credential designer enforced some design rules, mainly around the footer and the placement/style of the hologram and QR code.

From discussions with institutional clients, we recognised that we should offer more customisation options in the elements we offer on the credentials.

In this new release, you will be able to apply many more customisations to key elements, including:

• controlling the colour of the QR code and hologram,
• customising the typeface used on the signature and additional information elements, and,
• choosing the internal alignment of signature elements.

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While these changes might seem small, they add up to enabling a much more unique final design which truly reflects your brand.

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New credential shapes

The new credential designer will support three different credential shapes: portrait, landscape and square. This is another small update which we think will make a massive difference to how unique you can make your credentials.

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When the new designer is being released

You will be notified once the new credential designer is released and live in the next few weeks. 

With these changes implemented to the underlying architecture of the designer, this means existing template designs are now legacy and they will no longer be editable after the new credential designer is released. You will still be able to issue credentials using legacy templates. We believe the improvements to the user experience and the enhanced design capabilities will be worth this slight inconvenience.

If you need to update a legacy template, we are happy to work with you directly to ensure you can.

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What’s next?

We are continuously working to improve our customers’ experience. More feature enhancements will be released in due time, to make designing your achievements as seamless as possible.

Two other commonly requested features which will be implemented in the next few releases:

1. Enabling custom background images for credentials
2. Allowing you to change the image in the hologram to your own preferred logo

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If you have any questions or want a walkthrough of the new credential designer, feel free to get in touch with us at hello@verifyed.io or book a session with Abi.