Email Signature Design: What to Include and Layout Tips

How do you design an email signature?

Design an email signature by keeping it to a few short lines: your name, job title, company, one phone number and your website, with an optional small logo. Use your brand colors and a standard font, make sure the text is real text rather than one big image, and test it on a phone and in both Gmail and Outlook before you roll it out to your team.

This guide covers what to include, what to leave out, layout and branding tips, how to handle logos and images, and how to set up a signature in Gmail and Outlook. Pros Inc designs logos, stationery and brand identities for small businesses from our office in San Diego, and an email signature is part of the brand kits we deliver. Setup steps come from Google and Microsoft support pages, read as of October 2026.

Why your email signature matters

Your email signature appears at the bottom of every message you send. For many small businesses, that adds up to more brand impressions than any ad. A clean, consistent signature:

• tells people exactly how to reach you;
• makes your business look established and organized;
• keeps every employee’s emails looking like they come from the same company;
• connects your email to the rest of your brand, from your business cards to your letterhead.

What to include in an email signature

Most professional signatures need only these items:

Optional items, used sparingly:

• A small logo. Keep it modest in size so it does not dominate the message.
• Social media links. Two or three icons for the profiles you actually keep up to date.
• Pronouns. If your team chooses to include them.
• A short line of extra information. A booking link, office hours or a current event.

What to leave out

The most common mistake is adding too much. Leave out:

• inspirational quotes and long slogans;
• several phone numbers, unless people genuinely need them;
• your email address, since the recipient already has it;
• large banners and animated images;
• long legal disclaimers that are not required for your business.

If your industry does require a disclaimer, ask your legal advisor for the shortest approved wording and set it in a smaller, lighter font below the signature.

Layout and branding tips

Keep it to four to six lines. A signature should be scannable in a glance. If yours fills half a phone screen, cut it down.

Use one or two brand colors. Color your name or a thin divider line in your main brand color and keep the rest dark gray or black. Our guide to choosing a brand color palette explains how to pick these.

Choose a safe font. Email apps replace fonts they do not have, so a custom brand typeface may not display. Use a common font such as Arial, Helvetica, Georgia or Verdana that is close to your brand style. Our brand fonts guide explains how to choose web-safe fallbacks.

Check contrast. Light gray text on white is hard to read. The WCAG contrast guideline asks for at least 4.5:1 for normal text, a sensible target for the small type in a signature.

Use a simple structure. A stacked layout, with each item on its own line, works well on phones. A side-by-side layout, with the logo on the left and text on the right, looks polished on desktop but should still read clearly when it wraps on a narrow screen.

Keep everyone consistent. Use one template for the whole team, with only the name, title and phone number changing. Record it in your brand style guide so new employees set it up the same way.

Logos and images in email signatures

A logo can make a signature instantly recognizable, but images cause most signature problems.

• Do not make the whole signature one image. Text inside an image cannot be clicked, copied or read by screen readers, and some email apps hide images until the reader allows them.
• Keep the logo small. A logo slightly taller than two lines of text is usually enough.
• Use a light file. A compressed PNG or JPG keeps emails quick to load. Gmail counts an image toward its signature character limit, so a large file can cause an error.
• Add alt text. If the image does not load, short alt text such as your company name still appears. The W3C’s alt text decision tree explains how to write it.
• Use the right logo version. A horizontal logo usually fits better than a stacked one. Our guide to logo file formats explains which file to use.

How to set up your signature in Gmail and Outlook

Gmail

According to Gmail Help, you add a signature in Gmail on a computer by opening Settings, choosing See all settings, and entering your text in the Signature section. You can format the text and add an image. Gmail allows up to 10,000 characters in a signature, and images count toward that limit. If you send from more than one address, you can choose a different signature for each.

Outlook

Microsoft’s Outlook signature guide explains that in new Outlook for Windows you open Settings, then Accounts, then Signatures. You add a signature, give it a name, type and format it, and then choose whether it is added to new messages, replies and forwards. Outlook lets you save several signatures and pick one when writing a message.

Testing your signature

Before you roll it out, send a test email to yourself and a colleague and open it:

• in Gmail and Outlook on a computer;
• on an iPhone and an Android phone;
• in dark mode, where dark text on a transparent logo can disappear;
• after replying and forwarding, to see how it looks in a thread.

Email signature checklist

• Four to six lines with name, title, company, phone and website
• Real text, not one image
• One or two brand colors and a safe font
• A small, compressed logo with alt text
• Two or three social links at most
• Tested on desktop, mobile and dark mode
• One shared template for the whole team

If your business also sends marketing emails, make your signature match your newsletter design. Our email newsletter design guide covers that layout.

Frequently asked questions

Get a professional email signature

A tidy, consistent signature makes every email you send look like it comes from a well-run business. If you need a signature template for your team, a logo refresh or a full brand kit, contact Pros Inc at 715 J St #200, San Diego, CA 92101, or call (858) 652-8920.