About this signature generator

A form that turns eight fields into a block of email HTML you can paste anywhere, built by one developer who was tired of tools that host your logo for you.

Email HTML is stuck roughly where the web was in 2003, and pretending otherwise is how signatures end up looking wrong for half the people who receive them. This page accepts that constraint instead of fighting it. You type your details, a preview updates on every keystroke, and the markup underneath is a single table with every rule written directly onto the cells.

Making the markup survive Outlook and Gmail

Two rendering engines account for most of the pain. Outlook on Windows lays out mail with Microsoft Word, which has no support for float, flexbox or grid, treats margin on block elements unpredictably, and resolves widths in points rather than pixels once a document scale is applied. Gmail takes the opposite approach: it is a browser, but it sanitises what you paste, discarding <style> blocks entirely and rewriting or dropping attributes it does not recognise.

The intersection of what both accept is narrow and well known: nested tables for structure, cellpadding and cellspacing zeroed explicitly, padding declared on <td> rather than margin on paragraphs, colours as six-digit hex, and a font stack of names that ship with Windows and macOS. Everything this generator produces stays inside that set. There is no clever fallback and no conditional comment, because the output never asks for anything that would need one.

Your input is escaped before it reaches the markup, so an ampersand in a company name renders as an ampersand and a stray angle bracket cannot break an attribute. Fields you leave blank are removed along with their row or separator, which is why the one-line layout never shows a dangling pipe.

No images, no web fonts

A remote logo is blocked by default on first contact in most clients, so your recipient sees an empty box exactly when the impression matters. Base64 images are stripped by Gmail. Attached images ride along in every reply and make a plain message look like it carries a document. All three failure modes are avoided by not offering images at all.

Web fonts fail more quietly. Almost no mail client honours @font-face, so the browser falls back to a default that is usually wider than the font you designed against — and a signature laid out to the pixel around a font that never loads is a signature that wraps in the wrong place. A system font stack renders at a predictable width everywhere, including in the plain-text view and in dark mode.

What is out of scope

There is no logo hosting. Storing an image for you would mean running a file server, a URL that has to resolve for years, and a request from every inbox that opens your mail — which is a tracking pixel by any other name, whatever the intent.

There is no company-wide deployment: no directory sync, no admin console, no way to push one template to two hundred staff. That is a real problem, but it belongs to your mail administrator and to server-side transport rules, not to a static page.

There are no promotional banners, no campaign links, no social-icon strips and no "sent from" credit line. Nothing this tool generates points back at this site unless you type the address in yourself.

Who runs it

One independent developer. The site is static — a handful of HTML files, one stylesheet, one script per tool — hosted as plain files. There is no account system and no database, because the generator has nothing to keep.

If a client renders the output badly, that is worth knowing about; send the details and it will get looked at.