A handwritten signature for your email

An email footer with a handwritten signature image works best kept small — roughly the height of a line of text — sitting next to your typed name rather than replacing it, since email clients can still fail to load an image.

Getting the mark off the paper

Write on unlined white paper with a dark pen, photograph it straight down in daylight, and let the background be as bright as possible. A handwritten signature for your email start here: everything the software can do later depends on this one clean capture.

A transparent background is essential here: a signature with a white box around it looks noticeably out of place against a coloured or dark email theme, which a plain document rarely uses.

Placing it on the document

The finished signature should be a transparent image, cropped close, sized to the signature line rather than to the page. A white rectangle around it is the single most common giveaway that a signature was pasted in.

Reserve it for messages that benefit from a personal touch — client-facing emails, formal notices — rather than every message, where a signature image would be more clutter than a signal.

What makes it hold up

What usually matters in a dispute is not the beauty of the mark but the trail around it: who sent the file, when it was signed, from which address. The drawn signature is the visible part of a much longer record.

You can build any of these in the browser: open the Signature maker, draw or type your name, and place the result straight onto a PDF or Word file. Nothing is uploaded — the document never leaves your device.