Signature generator

This draws your signature. It does not typeset it.

Search for a signature generator and most of what comes back does the same thing: you type your name, it renders it in a handwriting font, you download the result. That is not a signature. It is a picture of your name in someone else's handwriting, identical for everyone who types the same letters, and a court or a bank looking at two of them side by side sees a font, not a person.

So this page gives you a drawing surface instead. Sign with a trackpad, a mouse, a finger on a phone or a stylus on a tablet, and what comes out is your own hand — slightly different every time, the way real signatures are. Nothing is typed, nothing is matched against a font library, and there are no fonts to licence, which is the other reason typed-signature sites tend to be worse than they look.

Drawing one that actually looks like yours

A trackpad signature made carefully is nearly always worse than a fast, sloppy one. Signatures are muscle memory: slow down and you draw each letter deliberately, which produces something that looks like careful handwriting rather than a signature. Sign at your normal speed, accept that the first two attempts will be bad, and press Undo.

The pen thins slightly when you move fast, which is what a real pen does and is most of the difference between a signature that looks drawn and one that looks traced. Turn it off if you want a flat, even line — sometimes that reproduces better at very small sizes. Pen width is deliberately generous by default: hairline signatures disappear when a PDF viewer scales them down.

A phone or tablet with a finger is usually the best input available to you, and the canvas takes touch and stylus events directly. If you have an iPad and an Apple Pencil, sign there and email yourself the PNG.

PNG or SVG, and which to use where

The transparent PNG is what you want for pasting into a document. There is no white box behind it, so it sits on top of the printed signature line rather than covering it. Word, Pages, Google Docs, Acrobat's stamp tool and every image field on every web form will take it.

The SVG is a genuine vector file: each stroke is a path with a round cap, not a traced bitmap. Scale it to a business card or to a poster and the edges stay clean. Use it when the signature goes into a logo lockup, an email template, a laser cutter or anything else that will be resized aggressively. Illustrator, Inkscape, Figma and every modern browser open it directly.

The third button writes a PNG on a solid white background, for the occasional system that rejects images with an alpha channel — some older HR portals and fax-to-email gateways still do. Everything is trimmed to the ink before export, with the padding you choose, so the file has no dead space around it.

What a drawn signature is and is not, legally

In the United States, the ESIGN Act and UETA make an electronic signature as enforceable as an ink one for most ordinary agreements, provided the signer intended to sign and the parties agreed to do business electronically. The EU's eIDAS regulation says something similar for what it calls a simple electronic signature. An image of your handwriting dropped into a PDF falls into that category, and it is what the overwhelming majority of contracts, delivery notes, consent forms and school permission slips are signed with in practice.

What it is not is a cryptographic digital signature. Those are certificate-based, bind the signature to a specific document so that any later edit invalidates it, and identify the signer through a certificate authority. If you have been asked for a digital certificate, a qualified electronic signature or a document that will fail validation when altered, a drawn image will not satisfy it. Some transactions — wills, certain property deeds, notarised documents, and anything your jurisdiction specifically excludes — also require more. This is general information, not legal advice; when the document is serious, ask the party requesting it what form of signature they will accept.

One practical security note, since it is rarely mentioned: a signature image is copyable by anyone who receives it. Treat the file the way you would treat a scan of your passport. It is not stored here — the strokes live in this page's memory and vanish when you close the tab, and nothing is transmitted — but once you email the PNG, it is out of your hands.