Three ways to make a signature
| Way | Best for | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Draw | A signature that is genuinely yours, signed with a stylus, finger or mouse | PNG and a true SVG of the strokes |
| Type | A quick, tidy mark for email footers and internal forms | PNG and an SVG of the letter shapes |
| From a photo | The signature you already sign on paper, kept exactly as it is | High-resolution transparent PNG |
Everything happens in your browser. The drawing, the handwriting fonts and the photo clean-up all run on your own device, nothing is uploaded, and there is no account, free-trial countdown or e-signature subscription at the end of it — which is what most of the signature generator sites at the top of the search results are really selling.
Photographing a signature you already have
Most signature tools offer an “upload” button that takes your picture as it is — grey paper, shadow and all — and drops it onto the document as a rectangle. This one removes the paper. It estimates how bright the paper is around every part of the signature, rather than applying one threshold to the whole picture, so a photo that is bright at one edge and shadowed at the other still comes out as clean ink on a transparent background, cropped to the signature itself.
For the best result: sign on plain white paper with a dark pen, photograph it straight on in even light, and keep your own shadow out of the frame. Then use the clean-up slider — raise it if patches of paper survive, lower it if thin strokes disappear. The preview sits on a checkerboard so you can see exactly what is transparent.
PNG or SVG?
A PNG is a grid of pixels. It is what every document editor, email client and web form accepts, and the transparent version drops onto a contract with no white box around it. Pick the width you need before downloading — the tool shows how large that is when printed at 300 dpi, which is the number that actually matters on paper.
An SVG is made of lines. It has no resolution at all, so the same file is crisp in an email footer and on a printed poster, and it is usually only a few kilobytes. A drawn signature becomes the strokes you made; a typed one becomes the outlines of the letters, taken from the font itself rather than traced from an image. A photographed signature cannot become an SVG, because it started as pixels — anything claiming otherwise is guessing at curves.
What size should it be?
- On paper: aim for the width you would really sign, roughly 60–80 mm. At 300 dpi that is about 700–950 pixels wide.
- In an email footer or on a web page: 300–600 pixels is plenty; anything more just slows the page down.
- In a Word or Google document: download at 800–1200 pixels and let the editor scale it down — scaling down stays sharp, scaling up does not.
- Not sure: take the SVG. It fits every one of these.
Is an image of your signature legally valid?
In many everyday situations, yes. In the United States the federal ESIGN Act and the state UETA laws say a signature cannot be denied legal effect merely because it is electronic, and in the European Union the eIDAS Regulation says the same of electronic signatures in general. An image of your handwriting placed on a document is one kind of electronic signature.
There are limits worth knowing. ESIGN lists exceptions — wills and testamentary trusts, adoption and divorce papers, court documents, and certain official notices — where electronic signatures do not apply. A court can still ask whether you really signed, and an image on its own carries no proof of who made it or when. That is the difference between an electronic signature and a digital signature: the latter is a cryptographic seal made with a certificate, which proves the signer's identity and reveals any change made after signing. No picture can do that, whatever a site promises. If a bank, a government body or the document itself asks for a qualified or certificate-based signature, use a service that issues certificates.
This is general information, not legal advice.
Keeping it yours
A signature image is worth protecting: anyone who has the file can put it on any document. Because nothing here is uploaded, the only copy is the one you download — keep it somewhere private rather than in a shared drive or an email thread, and prefer sending a signed document over sending the signature by itself. Closing this page throws the working copy away, so download it before you leave.
Signing a document with it
To put the signature straight onto a PDF without a download step, use Sign PDF — it has this same signature pad built in, places the signature where you drag it, can copy it to every page, and adds a date or your printed name. If your PDF is password-protected, Unlock PDF first. To stamp a document as a draft or a copy rather than sign it, use Add Watermark to PDF.