The short answer
A professional email signature should include five things, in this order: your name and job title; no more than four ways to reach you; your company name, logo and website; any legally required company details; and nothing else. Keep the whole block under 600 pixels wide, use two fonts and two colours at most, and put the legal text last in smaller grey type.
Key takeaways
- Five blocks: identity, contact, company, legal, campaign. One purpose per line.
- Four numbers settle most arguments: 600px maximum width, 2 fonts, 2 colours, logo no wider than 180px supplied at 360px.
- A signature and a legal disclaimer are two different things with two different jobs. Do not merge them.
- Every field you add is a field someone has to keep accurate. A signature with nine rows is wrong nine ways instead of four.
The five blocks of an email signature
A signature reads well when each block answers exactly one question. Five blocks, always in this order, and never more than one purpose per line.
- Identity. Your name, then your job title. Optionally pronouns. This is the only block that should use a display font.
- Contact. At most four rows. A person offering a desk phone, a mobile, an email address, a fax number and a chat handle has given you five ways to be ignored.
- Company. Logo, company name, website, and the office location if it is meaningful to the reader.
- Legal. Registered company details and any required disclosure. Small, grey, and always last.
- Campaign. One banner slot, fixed dimensions, empty by default. Reserve the space even if you have nothing to put in it, because adding it later means rebuilding every template.
Field by field: what to include and what to cut
The optional-field discussion consumes more meeting time than anything else in a signature project, mostly because nobody arrives with a position. Here is a position.
| Field | Include? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Full name | Always | Match your directory display name so it is consistent everywhere else |
| Job title | Always | The line most often missing and most often out of date. Source it from the directory, not from the person |
| Company name | Always | Non-negotiable. If your group has several legal entities, this must be the sender’s own |
| Company logo | Always | PNG at twice display size, hosted on your own domain, with alt text |
| Website | Always | One link. Not three |
| Office phone | Usually | Only if it reaches you. A number that rings an empty desk is worse than no number |
| Mobile number | Opt-in | Some roles must publish it, some must not. Never make it mandatory for everyone |
| Email address | Optional | The recipient already has it. Useful only when messages get forwarded |
| Pronouns | Opt-in | Individually chosen, so it must be a field the person controls. Never inferred |
| Photograph | Discourage | Adds weight, fails for a predictable share of staff, and a missing photo looks worse than no photo |
| Social icons | Max three, corporate only | Personal profiles date fast and raise an endorsement question nobody has answered |
| Booking or calendar link | Customer-facing roles | Genuinely useful. Restrict by role so it does not become universal clutter |
| Office address | Sometimes | Include if customers visit or if company law requires the registered office |
| Fax number | Remove | If a fax number is genuinely required, it belongs on the invoice |
| “Please consider the environment” | Remove | Adds weight to every message in order to ask people not to print, which they were not going to do |
| Quotations and slogans | Remove | The rule that generates complaints. Have a senior sponsor own it rather than the person enforcing it |
Ask who keeps it accurate. Every field is a maintenance commitment, and a signature with nine rows is wrong in nine ways instead of four. If the answer is “the employee”, it will be wrong within a year.
The four numbers that settle the argument
Most design disagreements about signatures end quickly once these are agreed in advance rather than debated per template.
- 600 pixels maximum width. Wider than that and the block causes horizontal scrolling in narrow reading panes and on phones.
- Two fonts, maximum. And both must be common system fonts with a named fallback, because your brand’s web font will not load in most email clients.
- Two colours, maximum. One for text, one for accents. Check both against a dark background before you commit.
- Logo no wider than 180 pixels, supplied at 360. Display size and asset size are different numbers. Supplying the asset at twice the display size is what stops it looking soft on high-resolution screens.
A signature and a disclaimer are not the same thing
Email signature — the block identifying the sender: name, role, contact details and company branding. Its job is to tell the reader who you are and how to reach you.
Email disclaimer — the legal text below it: confidentiality notices, company registration details, regulatory disclosures. Its job is to satisfy a legal or regulatory obligation.
They get merged because they occupy the same physical space, and the merge causes two problems. The disclaimer grows into the signature and makes the whole block unreadable, and the signature’s styling gets applied to legal text that needs to be plain, small and consistent. Keep them visually separate: a thin rule between them, and the legal text in smaller grey type.
In many countries the disclaimer is not optional. Commercial correspondence is frequently required to carry the registered company name, registered office and registry number — and in most organizations that requirement is discharged, if at all, in the email signature. That is a compliance question rather than a design one, and it is worth confirming what applies to your company before you finalise the block.
What about mobile?
Most people never set up a signature on their phone, which means a meaningful share of a company’s outbound mail carries either nothing or the default “Sent from my iPhone”. If you only fix desktop, you have fixed the smaller half.
Two workable approaches. Either publish a short plain-text version for people to set up manually and accept that compliance will be partial, or apply the signature centrally on the mail server, in which case it appears on everything regardless of which device sent it. The second is the only one that produces consistency you can actually rely on.
A quick checklist before you finalise
- Under 600 pixels wide, two fonts, two colours.
- Logo hosted on your own domain, at twice display size, with alt text.
- Legible when images are blocked — nothing important lives inside an image.
- Legible in dark mode, including the logo.
- No more than four contact rows.
- Legal text separate, small, and correct for your legal entity.
- Tested in Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, the web client, and a real phone.
- Every field has a named owner who keeps it accurate.
Frequently asked questions
What should an email signature include?
Five things, in order: your name and job title; no more than four ways to reach you; your company name, logo and website; any legally required company registration details; and a reserved space for a campaign banner if you use one. Keep the whole block under 600 pixels wide, use at most two fonts and two colours, and set the legal text last in smaller grey type.
How wide should an email signature be?
No wider than 600 pixels. Beyond that, the block causes horizontal scrolling in narrow reading panes and on phone screens, which is the most common reason a signature that looked correct in testing looks broken to recipients. The logo inside it should display no wider than about 180 pixels, supplied as an image twice that size so it stays sharp on high-resolution screens.
Should an email signature include a photo?
Usually not. A photo adds weight to every message, will be missing for a predictable share of staff, and a signature with a missing photo looks worse than one that never had a photo. If photos are required for customer-facing roles, source them from your directory, decide what renders when one is absent, and restrict the field by role rather than applying it to everyone.
Should you put your mobile number in your email signature?
Only by choice. Some roles must publish a mobile number and some must not, so it should be an opt-in field rather than a mandatory one. Bear in mind that an email signature is published to every recipient of every message you send, including people who forward it onwards, so treat any personal contact detail in it as public.
What is the difference between an email signature and an email disclaimer?
The signature identifies the sender: name, role, contact details and branding. The disclaimer is the legal text below it: confidentiality notices, company registration details and regulatory disclosures. They occupy the same space but do different jobs, and merging them makes the whole block unreadable. Keep them visually separate with a thin rule, and set the legal text smaller and in grey.
Do email signatures need to include company registration details?
In many countries, yes, for commercial correspondence. Requirements commonly include the registered company name, the registered office and a company registry number, and in some jurisdictions a registered website address. Email is generally treated as commercial correspondence, which is why the requirement lands in the signature. Confirm what applies to your company and each of its legal entities, because the details differ per entity.
How many fonts and colours should an email signature use?
Two of each at most. Both fonts must be common system fonts with a named fallback, because the web font in your brand guideline will not load in most email clients and will be silently substituted. Two colours, one for text and one for accents, and both should be checked against a dark background before you commit to them.
Why do so few people have a signature on their phone?
Because setting one up manually on a mobile client is fiddly and nobody reminds them, so phone-sent mail typically carries either nothing or a default line like “Sent from my iPhone”. Since a large share of business email is now sent from phones, fixing only desktop signatures fixes the smaller half of the problem. Applying the signature centrally on the mail server is the only approach that covers every device.