Guidelines for signature design

Email 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 tricky if you are unsure where to begin.

This page lists the different parameters you need to keep in mind while designing your signature template:

Signature size

Max width

Min width

Optimal size

Layout

Image size

File format

Signature size

This is entirely up to you how wide or high you wish your signature template to be.

In some scenarios, you may come across specific issues such as Signatures appearing small on Mobile Devices - here, we recommended the signature width to ideally be: 

Max-width 

The maximum width of a signature should be no more than 600px. This allows the signature template to fit nicely onto various screen sizes and email clients.

Min-width 

The minimum width of a signature should be no less than 320px. This ensures that the signature template does not have any issues on mobile devices and 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 and reduces the scaling issues found on mobile devices.

Layout

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

Adding tables within tables allows you to achieve the most basic to the most complex 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, please ensure that the image file you choose is already at 200 x 100 pixels.

For compatibility with mobile devices, we recommend that banner images 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 and link to them or embed them into the signature template; either way, they must be uploaded at the correct size.