01
What to include.
- Full name
- As you introduce yourself at work. Set larger than everything else, so it is what the eye lands on.
- Job title
- The role that tells a reader why you are writing to them.
- Company
- Its name and, if you have one, its logo, small.
- Phone
- A direct line if people call you. Not the switchboard.
- Email and website
- Working links, so nobody has to copy and paste.
- Photo
- Optional, and worth it when people work with you over time.
- Social links
- Only the networks your readers use, usually LinkedIn and one other.
That is the whole list. A signature that tries to say everything is read as clutter and skipped.
02
What to leave out.
Inspirational quotes, a list of every award, a row of ten icons, a second phone number nobody answers, and a signature made as one big picture. The last is the most common mistake: many mail clients block images until the reader allows them, and a signature that is only an image becomes an empty box with a red cross.
Legal notices and confidentiality lines, where your work requires them, go under the signature as plain text, not inside a graphic.
03
How big it should be.
About 320 pixels wide. That is the width of the narrowest phone screen still in common use. A wider signature does not just get cut off: Apple Mail on the iPhone shrinks the whole email to fit its widest part, so a 600 pixel signature makes the text of the message itself smaller.
Every design in the generator is 320 pixels wide for that reason, and the images in a signature come to about a quarter of a megabyte, so it loads quickly on a phone connection.
04
Professional does not have to mean static.
A photo that animates once and then rests reads as care, not decoration, as long as the motion is small and the finished frame is the one people are left with. That last part matters in Outlook: older Outlook for Windows, and any Outlook with animation effects switched off, shows only the first frame of a GIF. Every animation in the generator starts on the finished photo, so an Outlook reader sees a complete signature.
05
Check it before you send it.
- Send a test email to yourself and open it on your phone.
- Click every link, including the social icons.
- Turn images off in your mail client and read it again: the name, role and links should still be there as text.
- Look at it in dark mode, where white logos on transparent backgrounds disappear.
- Reply to the test, to check the signature is set for replies as well as new messages.