Signature Pad

The trick is to write at the speed and pressure of a real pen, not the slow, careful strokes most people use on a touchpad. Hold your finger or stylus the way you hold a pen, plant your wrist on the desk to anchor it, and write the whole signature in one fluid motion. Don't draw letter by letter. The signature pad here defaults to a 3px black stroke on a 600px-wide canvas, which roughly matches a fine-tipped pen on a slip of A6 paper, so the proportions feel familiar.

If your first attempt looks like a four-year-old's, try three things in order. First, slow down only on the loops and pick up the speed on straight strokes. Second, drop the pen size from 3 to 2 if your real signature is fine, or push to 4-5 if you tend to write thick. Third, write bigger than you'd write on paper, then export and let the recipient print at scale - a signature drawn at 600px wide and printed at 5cm reads beautifully, while one drawn at 100px and stretched looks pixelated.

This signature pad lets you download two ways. The transparent version drops out the background entirely, so you can layer your signature over a contract PDF, a letter template, or a photograph without a white box around it. The opaque version keeps the white fill, which is what you want when the recipient is going to print and scan, since transparency can render unpredictably in some PDF viewers and email clients.

Rule of thumb: send the transparent PNG when the document already has a signature line you want to overlay, and send the opaque one when the recipient is pasting the image somewhere unknown. If you're not sure which the recipient needs, send both - they cost you nothing and the file sizes are tiny (typically under 30KB for a black-ink signature). Pair this with a [PDF compressor](/whiteboard) workflow if you're combining the signature with other artwork later.

In the UK, an electronic signature is legally valid for almost all contracts under the Electronic Communications Act 2000 and the eIDAS Regulation as retained in UK law. A drawn signature created in a signature pad and pasted into a PDF is a 'simple electronic signature' - the lowest tier - and is binding for everyday contracts including employment agreements, NDAs, supplier contracts, leases under 7 years and consumer purchases.

The exceptions are narrow but worth knowing. Some property transactions (deeds), wills, lasting powers of attorney and certain HMRC declarations still require a wet-ink signature or a qualified electronic signature with identity verification. If you're signing a £400k house transfer, don't use a free signature pad. For everything else - the £200 freelance invoice, the contractor onboarding form, the school permission slip you forgot until 9pm - a drawn PNG signature is fine and has been since at least 2002.

Treat your signature PNG like a credit card photo. Save it in a password-protected note or vault rather than your camera roll, and never email it as an unencrypted attachment unless the recipient genuinely needs the raw file. Anyone with the image can paste it into a fake document, and while courts will look at metadata and intent, you're handing them a head start.

A reasonable working setup: generate the signature once on this pad, download both transparent and opaque versions, save them in your password manager's secure-files area, and delete the local copy from Downloads. Re-export each time you need a fresh signature for a high-value document; the file is small and the act of re-drawing creates a slightly different image, which is its own form of authenticity. The [whiteboard tool](/whiteboard) is the one to use if you want a quick scratch sketch with no security concerns - keep them mentally separate.