Build an email signature generator your whole team fills in the same way

What goes in a signature

Less than most people think. Each line should help the recipient reply, call or understand who you are:

• Name, and optionally pronouns
• Job title and team
• Company name
• One or two contact routes: a direct phone number, perhaps a booking link
• The company website
• Optional: one line for a current campaign or a required legal notice, such as a registered company number where your country expects it

Leave out inspirational quotes, five social icons and the full postal address unless people really post you things. Long signatures repeat on every reply in a thread.

Why email HTML is different

Email clients don't render HTML like browsers. Some desktop versions of Outlook use a word-processing engine for layout, many clients strip <style> blocks, and dark mode can invert colours unpredictably. A signature that looks right everywhere uses old, conservative techniques:

Tables for layout

A simple table, not flexbox or grid, which some clients ignore.

Inline styles

Every colour, size and font set on the element itself.

Web-safe fonts

Arial, Helvetica, Georgia or Verdana, with fallbacks. Custom web fonts mostly won't load in email.

Real text

Names and numbers as text, not inside an image, so they're readable with images blocked and can be copied.

Modest colours

Mid-tone brand colours that survive dark-mode inversion; avoid pure black text on a coloured block.

Ask the model for exactly these constraints, then test the result in the clients your team uses: send a test email to Gmail, Outlook on Windows, Outlook on the web and Apple Mail, and look in dark mode too.

The logo question

An image in a signature has to be hosted somewhere public so recipients' mail clients can load it. Anticode's apps can't host or upload a file for you, and many clients block remote images by default anyway. You have three honest options:

1. No image. Use the company name in brand colour and weight. Clean, and never broken.
2. An image you host. Put the logo at a public address you control (your own website is the obvious place) and type that address into the generator. The signature references it.
3. Let the mail client add it. Some clients let you insert an image into the signature editor directly; the generator handles the text.

Describing it to Anticode

"An email signature generator for our company. A form for name, pronouns (optional), job title, team, direct phone, mobile (optional) and a booking link (optional). Company name, website and colours are fixed: navy and coral. Output: a table-based HTML signature with inline styles, Arial, real text, a logo image from a public URL I'll set, and a plain-text version. A live preview, a light and dark preview, and Copy buttons for rich text and for HTML source. Short setup instructions for Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail."

Copying is the part to test. Anticode's app frame allows writing to the clipboard, but copying rich text behaves differently across browsers and mail clients, so ask for copy buttons and also a visible box with the HTML selected, which works as a fallback: select, copy, paste.

Rolling it out to a team

Publish the generator and send the link round. Each person fills in their own details; nothing is stored or shared between them, because the app has no network and only remembers what someone typed in their own browser. That's a feature for privacy, and it means you can't see who has updated theirs. A quick check of a few recent emails does the job.

Limits

• It can't install signatures in anyone's mail account. Each person pastes their own; central management needs your email provider's admin tools.
• No directory lookup. It can't fill details from your staff directory.
• No image hosting for logos or headshots.
• No click tracking on signature links.

For a consistent look elsewhere, see brand guidelines to website, and for the address that signature links point to, email with a custom domain.

Questions people ask

Will the email signature generator's output work in Outlook?

If it uses tables, inline styles and web-safe fonts, it usually does. Always send a test to the Outlook versions your team uses.

Can I add social media icons?

Icons are images, so they need public hosting and may be blocked. Text links are more reliable.

Is anyone's data stored?

Only in their own browser, if you ask the app to remember their details. Nothing is sent anywhere.