Signed, Sealed, Slightly Off-Brand: Rethinking the Humble Email Signature

Somewhere in your company there are 34 email signatures, and no two of them agree.

One has the logo stretched to 340 pixels because a person dragged it and didn't tell anyone. One is in a font that's technically a fallback. One finishes with a motivational quote about hustling, attributed to someone who may or may not exist. And at the bottom of the sales director's mail there's a registered company name that was quietly retired in 2019.

We spend thousands on a logo, then let the last three lines of every email be decided by whoever got there first. That's a strange way to run a brand — and an easy one to fix.

The bit nobody reads until something goes wrong

Under UK company law, a limited company has to disclose certain details on its business letters, order forms and websites: the registered name, the part of the UK where it's registered, the registered office address, and the company number. If you're VAT registered and the document mentions VAT, the VAT number should appear too. LLPs and charities have their own flavours of this.

Whether an email counts as a "business letter" is the kind of question a solicitor will happily bill an afternoon to.

Most sensible brands skip the argument. Four short items take up less room than a badly kerned job title, and getting them right means nobody has to scramble when a procurement team in Leeds asks for your company number on a Tuesday morning.

The rest of the block — the headshot, the pronouns, the calendar link, the little green dot that says available — is optional theatre. Some of it's lovely. All of it competes for the same half-second of attention.

Three lines is a design decision

A signature isn't a badge. It's the last thing a reader sees before they reply, file the email, or forget you. That makes it a sign-off, and sign-offs work best when they're short.

Line one: who. Name, in the same typeface as everything else you make. No bold, no colour, no all-caps. If your audience is outside the company, this is the one line they'll read.

Line two: what. Role and studio, separated by a middot rather than a pipe character (pipes look like broken tables). Two words, ideally. "Design Lead" beats "Senior Creative Lead — Brand & Digital Transformation".

Line three: how to reach you. One website, one phone number, the legal line. If you can make the website a link and leave everything else as plain text, do that — it's the only link most inboxes will still trust.

Anything else should have to justify its place. A headshot earns it if you're client-facing and building trust over many emails. A calendar link earns it if you're booking meetings all day. A quote about grit almost never does.

Why it looks fine on your screen and odd on theirs

Most signature problems are not aesthetic. They're structural.

• Images get blocked. Gmail hides remote images by default. If your logo doesn't have alt text, the reader sees a grey rectangle where your brand should be.
• Outlook ignores your CSS. Desktop Outlook uses a Word rendering engine. Flexbox, modern fonts, background images — all quietly discarded. Tables still work. Tables will always work.
• Dark mode inverts things. A black logo on a white background turns into a black logo on a dark background. Test it, or use a transparent PNG with enough contrast to survive both.
• Mobile narrows everything. Keep the block under about 480 pixels wide, body copy at 14px with 1.5 line height, and check it at 200% zoom.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a signature that looks designed and one that looks like it happened.

The OneLine template (copy, paste, adjust)

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:1.5; color:#1a1a1a;">
  <tr><td style="padding-bottom:2px;"><strong>Maya Okafor</strong></td></tr>
  <tr><td style="padding-bottom:2px;">Design Lead &middot; OneLine Studio</td></tr>
  <tr><td style="padding-bottom:6px;"><a href="https://onelinestudio.co.uk" style="color:#1a1a1a;">onelinestudio.co.uk</a> &middot; +44 7700 900123</td></tr>
  <tr><td style="font-size:12px; color:#6b6b6b;">OneLine Studio Ltd &middot; Registered in England &amp; Wales &middot; Company No. 12345678 &middot; Registered office: 1 Example Street, Manchester M1 1AA</td></tr>
</table>

Three lines of identity, one line of legal. No quote, no gradient, no clipart. If you want a logo, put it in a separate cell with alt text and a max-width of 120px — but try the version without it first. Typography usually wins.

The ten-minute teardown

Ask everyone to do this in one sitting, then stop talking about it until next spring.

1. Open your most recent sent email on your phone, with images blocked. Can you still tell who sent it?
2. Switch the phone to dark mode. Does anything disappear?
3. Check the legal line: registered name, company number, registered office, VAT if relevant.
4. Cut every line that isn't name, role, contact or legal. Add one back only if you can argue for it out loud.
5. Reduce to a single hyperlink.
6. Set body text to 14px, line height 1.5, block width under 480px.
7. Test at 200% zoom in Outlook desktop — the harshest room in the building.
8. Push it through whatever tool your company uses (Exclaimer, Signature Hound, or a template locked in Google Workspace), so nobody can invent their own.
9. Delete the old signature from your drafts folder so you don't keep sending two versions.
10. Diarise a review for the next time the logo, the address or the phone number changes.

The line at the end

A brand isn't the logo on the homepage. It's every small thing that carries your name into someone else's day — and the email signature does that more often than any page on your site.

Three lines. One legal footer. Signed off properly. That's the whole brief.