How to Create a Professional Email Signature in Gmail and Outlook

Setting up a signature takes five minutes. Getting it to actually look right, on both platforms, on a phone, and six months from now when someone forwards a thread from 2019, takes a little more care than that. Gmail and Outlook handle signatures differently enough that a signature built for one often breaks in small ways on the other.

This covers the setup in both, where the logo sizing goes wrong, and the mobile gap that catches almost everyone.

What to put in it first

Before touching either platform's settings, have the content ready: name, role, company, one phone number, a link to your site, and a small logo if it renders cleanly at signature size. The email signature generator guide covers what to include and what to cut. Most of the "amateur" look in a signature comes from having too much in it, not from missing pieces. Build it as text plus one logo image, not a single flattened screenshot: recipients can still copy your number, and the logo doesn't turn into a blurry mess on a retina screen.

Setting it up in Gmail

On the web:

1. Open Gmail, click the gear icon, then See all settings.
2. Stay on the General tab and scroll to Signature.
3. Click Create new, name the signature, and build it in the editor: type your name and details, then use the image icon to insert your logo (upload it rather than pasting, so it doesn't get compressed unpredictably).
4. Below the editor, set this signature as the default for new emails and, separately, for replies/forwards. These are two different dropdowns, and it's easy to set one and forget the other.
5. Scroll down and click Save Changes.

On the Gmail mobile app, this is a separate setting: open the hamburger menu, go to Settings, pick the account, and look for the mobile signature option (Google reshuffles this screen occasionally, so the exact label can shift). On most phones it only accepts plain text, doesn't support images, and won't pull from the web signature automatically. If you want a consistent signature across devices, set both, and treat the phone one as a text-only fallback.

Setting it up in Outlook

Outlook has two current interfaces, and which one you're looking at changes the steps.

New Outlook and Outlook.com (web):

1. Click the gear icon for Settings.
2. Go to Mail > Compose and reply.
3. Under Email signature, create a signature, add your text, then insert the logo through the image button.
4. Check both boxes for automatically including it — new-message and reply/forward defaults are off out of the box.
5. Click Save.

Classic desktop Outlook (Windows):

1. Go to File > Options > Mail.
2. Click the Signatures button.
3. Click New, name it, and build the signature in the editor, inserting the logo image the same way as Gmail.
4. On the right side of that window, assign the signature to the correct account and set defaults for new messages and for replies/forwards.
5. Click OK, then OK again to close Options.

Outlook Mobile: open Settings, tap the account, and find Signature. Formatting here is more limited than desktop, and there's a separate toggle for whether the signature applies at all on that device. Same issue as Gmail: check it, don't assume it inherited your desktop setup.

Logo sizing, the part that goes wrong most often

Keep the logo small, roughly 40 to 80 pixels tall depending on how the rest of the signature is laid out. Export it as a PNG at double the display size so it holds up on retina screens, and use a version with a transparent background so it doesn't sit in a visible white box against a colored email theme. If your main logo is a wide horizontal lockup, it will look cramped at this size; the icon-only mark is usually the better fit for a signature. Test the signature against both a light and dark email theme, since a dark logo can disappear on a dark background if you only exported one version. Light, dark, and transparent variations cover both cases if you don't already have them on hand.

What to leave out

Skip the inspirational quote, the second phone number nobody calls, a row of social icons for platforms you don't actually post on, and a legal disclaimer unless your industry specifically requires one. Four lines of signature under a two-line reply looks like a form letter. Cut it down to what someone would actually miss if it were gone.

Test it before you trust it

Send yourself a test email and open it on a phone, not just on the same screen you built it on. Check that the logo loads (some corporate mail servers block external images by default, so an image-heavy signature can show up as broken boxes), that the text is still selectable, and that nothing wraps oddly on a narrow screen. A signature that looks fine in the desktop editor can still break once a real mail client renders it, so repeat this check anytime you change the logo or restructure the layout.

Where Brandize fits

If you don't have a logo yet, start one on the Brandize home page before building the signature around it. If you already have a logo and want a formatted starting point instead of building the HTML by hand, the email signature generator fills in a small template with your logo, colors, and contact details, which you can then paste into Gmail or Outlook using the steps above.