Free email signature generator

Fill in your details, pick a layout, copy the result into your mail client. No account, no watermark, and nothing about you leaves your browser.

Why most email signatures break

An email signature is a small piece of HTML that your mail client pastes at the bottom of every message. The reason so many of them look broken on arrival is that email clients are not browsers. Outlook on Windows renders HTML with the Microsoft Word engine, which ignores most modern CSS: flexbox, grid, float, external stylesheets, web fonts, and in many versions even margin on a div.

So a signature designed like a web page falls apart. A signature built with a plain table, inline styles and a system font survives everywhere. That is all this generator produces: nested tables, style attributes on each element, Arial as the typeface, and no external files apart from the logo you point it at.

What makes a signature look professional

The mistake is almost always adding too much. A signature competes with the message above it, and every extra line makes the message harder to read. Four elements are enough for nearly everyone:

• Name, slightly larger and bold — the only element that needs weight
• Role and company on one line, in grey, so it reads as context rather than content
• One or two ways to reach you. Not five. Your email address is already in the header, so include it only if you want people replying to a different address
• One link, to the place you actually want people to land

What to leave out: a photo and a logo (choose one), social icons for five networks, legal disclaimers you copied from somebody else, quotations, "sent from my phone", and any image of text — which becomes unreadable the moment a client blocks images.

How to use the generator

1. Type your details on the left. The preview updates as you type.
2. Choose a layout. Vertical accent bar is the safest across clients; logo on the left needs a square image; stacked is the most compact on phones.
3. Set an accent colour — ideally the one from your website, so the signature and your brand match.
4. Press Copy signature and paste into your mail client's signature box. If your client only accepts raw HTML, press Show HTML instead and copy that.

How much signature is too much

There is a measurable answer. A signature competes for attention with the message above it, and past a certain height the reader stops treating it as information and starts treating it as furniture. The thresholds that work:

The instinct when a signature feels thin is to add a line. The better move is almost always to remove one and make the remaining lines say something.

The same signature for a whole team

If more than one person sends mail under one brand, consistency does more for how the company looks than any individual design choice. Two colleagues with visibly different signatures makes a firm look improvised, and it is the most common signature mistake in small companies.

The practical method: generate one signature, fix the layout, the accent colour, the logo and the font sizes, then change only the text for each person. Keep the same order of elements — name, role, contact, link — so a recipient who deals with two of you sees one company rather than two individuals.

One thing worth deciding centrally is whether the company includes phone numbers at all. Sales and support usually should; everyone else often should not, and letting each person choose produces a signature set where the ones with numbers look more senior for no reason.

What happens to your signature in transit

Between pressing send and the recipient reading it, a signature passes through at least three systems that can change it: your own mail client, any gateway your company or your recipient's company runs, and the receiving client's renderer. Each one is allowed to rewrite HTML it does not like.

In practice this means three things worth knowing:

• You cannot fully control the result. A signature that renders perfectly in three clients you tested is a good signature, not a guaranteed one. Designing for graceful degradation matters more than designing for perfection.
• Images may be re-hosted or stripped. Corporate gateways sometimes proxy remote images through their own servers, which is why a logo can appear at a different size than you set — and why explicit width and height attributes matter.
• Plain-text copies exist. Many messages are sent as both HTML and plain text, and some recipients read the plain-text version. Whatever survives there is just your words, in order — another argument for never putting information inside an image.

Where to paste it

Every client hides the signature box somewhere different, and a couple of them reformat what you paste. The step-by-step for the three that account for most email:

• Gmail signature setup — including why Gmail strips some of your formatting and what to do about it
• Outlook signature setup — new Outlook, classic desktop and web, which behave differently
• Apple Mail signature setup — the awkward one, because pasting HTML is not officially supported

Frequently asked questions