‘Soft’ logos in email footers are common with even professional businesses failing to get their email signatures looking sharp. But there are actually three reasons why these problems arise:

1. The resolution of the logo will not be high enough
2. The logo uses compression
3. The logo is in the wrong format

When creating a logo for an footer it must be at least the correct size pixel for pixel. Typically logos are made of flat areas of colour and the best starting point for any logo is to convert from an EPS file. EPS files are vector-based logos and consequently scalable to any size without degrading. Logos should be available in a variety of formats including EPS. Many computers don’t have the software available to view them, however a professional designer will have the software needed to open them. EPS files can be imported into Photoshop and scaled to the correct size.

When exporting from Photoshop, the ideal file formats for email signatures are GIF or PNG. Avoid using JPEG files as they often generate artefacts through over compression. This is what causes ‘soft’ logos. On the other hand GIF and PNG-8 file formats handle flat colours very well as they use ‘indexed colour’ to keep file sizes to a minimum instead of compression.

To summarise:

• Start by importing an EPS file into Photoshop and set at the correct size

• Export from Photoshop using GIF or PNG-8 (set the number of indexed colours to the point where there is no noticeable ‘dither’.

If you are looking for further help correcting an email signature please give us a call on +44 (0)20 8972 9700.