A watermark is a small design
Most watermark tools treat the mark as one line of text you type and forget. A mark that does its job — readable at a tenth of the frame, recognisably yours, unobtrusive enough to live with — is a small piece of design: a name set in a face that suits it, perhaps a rule, perhaps a word underneath it in small capitals, perhaps all of it inside a thin circle. This page is for making that piece once, properly, and then using it everywhere.
The studio opens on a neutral board — 1,600 by 900 pixels, transparent, shown on a checkerboard — so you can design without a photograph in the way. When you want to see it on a picture, the folder button in the command bar swaps a photo in; the design does not change.
Stacking a name and a logo
| Wording | Any of the fourteen bundled faces or your own font file, a weight, letter-spacing, upper case or small capitals, and a size relative to the rest of the design. |
|---|---|
| Logo | Your logo file as one element of the design, drawn from its own file at whatever size the photograph needs. |
| Rule | A thin line between two lines of wording, as long as you set it — or a bar between elements in a row. |
| QR code | Encoded on this page from the link you type, as one element of the design. |
| Badge | A box, rounded box, pill or circle around the whole design, with its own border and an optional fill. |
Sizes are relative to each other, so a design stays the same proportion however large it is drawn. Auto ink sets every element to black or white per picture, measured from the pixels under the mark.
Saving the mark itself as a PNG or SVG
The PNG export draws the design alone on transparency at the width you set; the height follows the design. The SVG export runs the same drawing through a recorder that writes each shape and line of type out as SVG, so its layout is the PNG’s exactly. It is offered only when every element is a vector: a logo file is pixels, so a design that includes one saves as a PNG, and the panel says so. Both files are made on this device; nothing is sent to be rendered.
- Wording in the SVG stays as text with its face embedded (bundled faces) or named (system faces and your own file). Converting type to outlines is not offered here.
- Effects such as emboss and glow are drawn from pixels: a styled design saves as a PNG, and the SVG export is offered once the effect is set to None.
Using it in other software
A transparent PNG goes into a video editor as an overlay track, into a slide as a picture, into a design tool as a placed image. Keep the PNG wide — 2,000 pixels covers a 4K video frame at a tenth of its width — and scale it down where you use it. To use the same design on a whole folder of photographs instead, save the settings and open them on the batch route, or keep a recipe file so the design travels to another device.
Watermark maker questions
Can I save the watermark itself as a PNG?
Yes. “Save the watermark as PNG” writes the mark alone on a transparent background at the width you choose — 2,000 pixels unless you change it — named watermark-<width>x<height>.png. It is drawn by the same renderer that marks photographs, so it matches what you see on the board.
Can I use it in a video editor?
Yes — that is what the transparent PNG is for. Video editors, slide software and design tools all place a transparent PNG as an overlay. If the program takes SVG, the SVG export keeps the mark as shapes so it scales without softening; bundled faces are embedded in it.
Can I combine text and a logo?
Yes. A design holds up to six elements — lines of wording, a logo file, a rule, a QR code — stacked or in a row, with alignment and spacing, and optionally inside a badge: a box, a rounded box, a pill or a circle. The whole design then behaves as one mark: it is placed, sized, tiled and batched like any other.
Which fonts can I use commercially?
Every face bundled here is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows commercial use, including in a watermark and embedded in an SVG; the licence text and each family's copyright line are in /fonts/OFL.txt on this site. The system faces belong to your device, and your own font file is under whatever licence you bought it with.