Signature maker

Why a transparent PNG signature is handy

A signature image with a transparent background sits cleanly on any document: PDFs you need to fill out and return, contracts in Word, school forms, receipts. Without the white box around it, the signature blends with the text underneath as if it were signed with a real pen. For a more natural stroke, use your finger on a phone or tablet, a touch screen produces much smoother curves than a mouse.

Heads up: this is not a legally binding digital signature

This tool creates a simple graphic image of your signature. It is not a certified electronic signature or a cryptographic digital signature: for documents that require full legal enforceability (important contracts, government filings), use a dedicated e-signature service compliant with laws like the U.S. ESIGN Act or the EU eIDAS regulation, or a qualified signing certificate. For informal use and internal paperwork, though, a signature image is more than enough.

What this signature is actually worth

It is an image of a signature, and that has to be said plainly because the name misleads. It is not a digital signature with legal value: that is a cryptographic procedure based on a certificate issued by an accredited authority, held on a token or a remote device, which proves who signed and that the document has not been altered since.

An image pasted onto a PDF proves none of that: anyone can crop it from one document and put it on another. Under European rules it sits among the simple electronic signatures, which are not without value but whose weight a court decides case by case, taking the context into account.

When it is enough, and when something else is needed

It is almost always enough for everyday matters: a school form, an internal consent, an expense claim, a holiday request, a quotation accepted by email, a document between people who know each other and have no intention of disputing it.

It is not enough where the law requires a form: a property contract, a company deed, a power of attorney, an application to a public competition that demands a digital signature, a signed electronic invoice. In those cases a qualified digital signature or a digital identity is needed, and a pasted image wastes everybody's time.

How to get a signature that looks real

The problem with signing with a finger or a mouse is that the stroke comes out slow and shaky. Two habits solve nearly everything: sign quickly, in a single gesture, as you do on paper, and draw large, because reduced every signature improves while enlarged every flaw shows.

The alternative that gives the best result is signing on a white sheet, photographing it in diffuse light and removing the background: the stroke of a real pen has varying thickness that no on-screen drawing reproduces. In that case it is then best to save as transparent PNG, because a signature on a white rectangle covers the text of the document.

Where it should be kept, and where not

An image of your own signature is data to treat with the same care as an identity document: whoever gets hold of it can apply it to any sheet of paper. So it is best not to leave it lying around in shared folders, not to email it to people who do not have to sign anything, and not to upload it to services that keep it.

That is why here the drawing never leaves the browser, and you download the file yourself. And it is for the same reason that, when a signed document has to be sent, it is better to send it as a PDF and not the signature image on its own.

Nearby tools

To apply it to a document there is Sign a PDF, and to fill in fields Write on a PDF. If the background has to be removed from a photographed signature there is Transparent background, and to assemble the pages Image to PDF.