Email signature graphic design ideas

Email signatures are crucial elements of emails that summarize the key info about a person and act like a business card, just for email. One can see it whenever scrolling down to the bottom of the email. 

While the primary purpose of this email section is to let an email client know who you are and what you do, it is also a great chance to breathe life into the message. This is achieved when an email signature is visually appealing. As a result, apart from sharing your contacts, a professional email signature helps you make a lasting impression and stand out from the dull mass of other emails. 

Now, you might be wondering how to reach this goal and create a stylish email signature design on your own. To give simple answers, we compiled this short email signature design guide so read it on. 

What Makes a Brilliant Email Signature

A great email signature isn’t a complicated structure that needs you to have advanced skills in design. In fact, it is a simple but informative element that, as a rule, highlights the professional side of an individual. 

Even though email signatures are connected to business and professional activity, an email signature should not be boring or follow an email signature cliche. The most eye-catching email signatures, even those created by graphic designers, look laconic. They fit into the following rules of thumb. 

1. Minimalist color palette. 

When it comes to color, you want less because less is best in designer email signatures. One needs no special graphic design skills to choose a compelling palette. 

Color is great when you can handle it, say, graphic designers – close shades of the same color or a combination of pastels and neutrals can do especially well. In such cases, they act as amplifiers of content included in email signatures rather than distractors. 

Many email signature templates give hints on what colors would fit nicely. That’s an excellent place to start creating. Taking shades from your logo and other email elements is a win-win decision for all designer email signatures and a trick widely used by graphic designers. 

In contrast, too many bright shades make email signatures gaudy and make email clients want to find other, cooler shades to rest their eyes upon. 

Opposed to the previous example of the email signature, in this one, the author used colorful elements but note that they took small areas: 

2. Clear structure. 

The designer email signature must let the viewer intuitively go through the headline to the logo, contacts, and other info. In other words, the hierarchy of paragraphs should be seen. Here typefaces make a big difference for designer email signatures. 

No other elements do this job better than fonts. So choosing one simple and highly readable font with a few bold variations is a nice idea. In this case, a reader’s eye won’t be distracted by the font change, and it would be easier to perceive the info of first importance. 

3. High-quality images. 

That’s another rule of graphic designers. Not all images in the email signature should be minimalistic. A graphic designer wouldn’t miss a chance to add a personal touch and, for example, showcase their previous works from a portfolio or insert other related elements. Even captures that reflect your work process would be great for email signatures. 

4. Social media icons. 

Letting them know you’re on Facebook or LinkedIn can simplify your interaction and increase traffic to social media pages. Besides, social pages are where a customer can get answers to most questions and simply find additional information. 

Here is an email signature template with a good placement of social icons (like a graphic designer would prefer): 

Right under the name and job title, these email signature buttons catch the eye. Another ‘graphic designer’ solution is making the icons match the template’s palette. 

Many ready-made professional email signature templates offer good placement of these icons, so use this chance. 

5. Not filling in every space. 

Remember, there’s no place for long texts in email signature designs. Text canvas is taboo for a graphic designer. It looks boring and makes people skip it. So keep your sentences short, uncomplicated, and laconic. Also, abstain from long phrases if your points can be rendered with shorter alternatives. 

All in all, it’s okay for the email to consist of just a few paragraphs, with bigger intervals. They don’t necessarily need filling in! Good email signature templates will hint at how much text is allowed.

Like in the previous signature example, there’s just vital information. However, you can give way to your creativity and add other element types to email signatures (like animated GIFs). 

6. Use clickable contacts. 

A phone number, electronic portfolio, or a calendar for seeing when you have the time – all of this adds to the convenience of designer email signatures. In addition, they take an email signature to a higher level, saving clients’ time. 

Moreover, even a discount can be added as a clickable, turning graphic elements and text into real leads. 

7. Add dividers.

Fonts alone won’t be a good solution if your profession and activity demand more info than average to be included in the email. Dividers are the lines that help you zone text areas in a professional email signature—for instance, separate contact info from the job title and social media icons from the firm description. 

This tip works great if you have to use a small font yet want to make the email signature design as readable as possible. 

To follow these golden rules of creating a professional email signature, you don’t have to be a graphic designer or know HTML code to create elements such as an email signature. A lot of email signature templates are there for you to cope with the task in a matter of 15 minutes. 

Last but Not Least: Make Your Design Suitable for All Devices

Email signature design is never complete and perfect if you don’t make it fit multiple devices and screen sizes. A professional email signature should be okay to read with a mobile device. Some email signature templates clearly state that they’re fit for multiple devices. 

Since nearly half of email users open inbox letters on their smartphones, this is quite a big audience you can’t afford to lose by using the wrong email signature templates. 

Screens of smartphones are way smaller than laptops and computer monitors, so you should test how legible images and fonts are on all of them. This is where you might think: ‘Okay, learning to use HTML coding must help me!’

But don’t rush to conclusions. First, this would take too much time and won’t result in making great email signature templates, compared to using a decent HTML generator of email signatures of a graphic designer level. This would let you create designs like a pro graphic designer and won’t take the advanced design skills. 

To recap, this is essentially all you need to craft a beautiful graphic designer email signature and get the looks of a professional email signature. Add a reliable email template generator and some inspiration, and you nailed it.