Signature Design Guidelines

Relevant Products: Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for Office 365 | Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for G Suite | Signature Manager Exchange Edition | Signature Manager Outlook Edition

E-mail signature templates are an extension of your business stationery and marketing materials. They can also be referred to as a digital business card with your contact details, logos, social media, banners, disclaimers and so on.

However, creating and designing email signatures can be a tricky task if you are not sure where to begin.

Here we have listed the different parameters you need to keep in mind while designing the signature template:

Signature size

Max width

Min width

Optimal size

Layout

Image size

File format

If you are unsure of what to do.

Additional information: Limitations in Exclaimer Cloud and Pixel to Point conversions. 

Signature size

Although this is normally up to you on how wide or high the signature template needs to be; sometimes we come across specific issues such as Signatures appearing small on Mobile Devices - we have a few recommended widths that a signature should ideally be: 

Max-width 

The maximum width of a signature should be no more than 600px. This is to allow the signature template to fit nicely onto a variety of screen sizes and e-mail clients.

Min-width 

The minimum width of a signature should be no less than 320px. This is to ensure that the signature template does not have any issues on mobile devices, but also allows the signature to display nicely on larger screens.

Optimal size 

The optimal size of a signature should be around 450px. This gives plenty of room in the signature to have all the required information but also reduces the scaling issues found on mobile devices.

Layout

To layout your signature, we recommend using HTML tables where possible.

If you add tables within tables it allows you to achieve the most basic to the most complex of layouts, depending on the design required.

You can use padding as well where possible to create space between the design elements. This will be read universally by all mail clients and mobile devices. You can set a fixed width on any table to ensure the signature fits on mobile devices, tablets and monitors.

Image size

Images are very difficult to get right, as this depends on the size of the signature template itself and the nature of how the image was constructed in terms of resolution. 

For optimal mail client support and to stop signature images from appearing larger than expected - an image should be the actual size you want it to be displayed in signatures.

For example, if your company logo should be displayed at 200 x 100 pixels in the signature then ensure that the image file you choose is already at 200 x 100 pixels.

For compatibility with mobile devices, we recommend that banner images should be no more than 600 pixels in width.

File format

The recommended file formats are:

• JPG
• JPEG
• PNG
• GIF

You can either host the images on a website or, embed them into the signature template, either way, the images must be uploaded at the correct size required. 

Embedded Images - the image is uploaded directly from your desktop into the template.

Web Hosted Images - the image is hosted on a public-facing server and uses hosted URLs to link into the signature template.

For further information please take a look at the following articles on Exclaimer Cloud and the On Premise Solutions for the differences between the two. 

Unsure of what to do?

If you are unsure where to begin or if you are having issues building your signature template, our Template Design team will be happy to assist you with any of your questions or problems. We also offer an Email Signature Design Service - this is a chargeable service where we take a copy of the signature design and build it exactly how you want, providing an importable file for the product you are using.