How to Easily Create Your Own Email Signature

Creating a professional and branded email signature is a great way to add a memorable impression on inquiring clients. I have a lot of clients requesting email signatures as part of their project, so I wanted to share with you how I easily create them to be compatible on almost all email providers.

Images May Not Show

The first thing I want you to know is that sometimes your images may not show. If you have an email signature that is entirely an image, in some cases where images are blocked, your email will not show to your receiver but remain as an attachment. This means the best format to create signatures is as text.

Software to Use

You don’t need any fancy software to create a signature. Hooray! I prefer Google Docs, but you can also use Microsoft Word if you have it. Pretty much any text creating software that allows you to format the text and use a table will work.

How To Create Your Signature

Open up Google Docs (or software of choice) and before beginning decide on what elements you want inside your signature.
Here are common elements:
Name, title, contact info (email, phone, address), website, social media links, tagline, logo, etc.

Hannah Robinson
Brand Specialist
hello@oaklynstudio.com
Oaklynstudio.com
Instagram | Facebook | Pinterest

Creating a Table

Decide on what kind of look you want. Do you want your logo on the left hand side, above or below your signature? This helps you decide on how many columns you need, as well as rows. Go to Insert > Table> and select how many rows and columns

Based on the information above, I’m going to create the table like so:

Then I’m going to simply hover on the lines and drag them to be the size I want.

Inserting Text

Now I’m going to insert the information and format the text. If you want to add color, keep your brand colors in mind. Under the  click “custom” to add the color values of your branded shades.

Adding Images

To add images simply find them on your computer, click the file name then drag over into the table cell. You can resize it by select the corners of the bounding box, holding shift and scaling down. You can also add social media icon images and link those if you prefer it over text. I personally like to minimize the amount of images due to my comment at the beginning of this post.

Merging Cells

Now that we have the info inside that we want, the next step is to add spacing around the edges (cell padding) and edit the colors of the table borders.
Depending on the design you may want to merge certain cells. To do so, highlight the cells you want to merge, right click and select “merge cells”.

Adding Padding

Right click inside the cell that you wish to edit and select “table properties”. I am going to edit the cell padding to be 0.2 in the area that includes the text information.

Hiding and coloring borders

Obviously having this black outline around the signature looks cheap. We can easily hide it by selecting a border by clicking on it (it should highlight blue when selected) and navigating to the toolbar and changing the width to 0pt.

You can leave some untouched as part of the design.

Inserting your signature

Now I have a signature! The next step is adding it into your email signature. Click above your new signature and drag over it to highlight the entire table. Right click to copy or cmmd+c. Navigate to your email provider and into the settings where your signature settings are. Paste the signature inside this area.

Next link up the items that need to be hyperlinked. This would most likely be any social media links you added.

Voilà! You have now created and inserted your signature.

Cheers!