Every team member's signature comes from the Email Signature tool (usage guide), never a hand-built copy. Email is the one place the design system's tokens cannot reach. The studio team owns the generator; each person owns their own details.
Regulations
This is an owned channel, so its regulations come from the technology rather than a platform owner. The constraint is what mail clients render faithfully, and it is unusually severe.
| Constraint | What it forces | Consequence if ignored |
|---|---|---|
| No CSS classes or custom properties | every rule is an inline style | the design system's tokens cannot reach this channel at all |
| Webfonts are stripped | a system font stack | the brand face never loads, in any client |
| Inline SVG is not rendered | raster only, hosted rather than embedded | the mark disappears in most inboxes |
| Layout runs on tables | nested tables, not flex or grid | modern layout collapses to a single column |
| Images are fetched at render time | asset URLs must be permanent | a moved file breaks every signature already sent |
These are properties of mail clients, not of any one provider, and they have been stable for years. Nothing here is expected to change.
Standards
The values below come from the brand manifest (cms/brands/bydefault/brand.json) at build time, so the signature cannot drift from the brand. Change them in the manifest, never in a sent signature.
| Element | Value | Format | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Signature card | fixed warm background, 10px corners, 20px padding, max-width 950px | inline-styled HTML table | one fixed colour, because email cannot read a token |
| Logo | 200×155, animated | GIF | hosted, fetched at render time |
| Contact icons | 24×24 shown, 48×48 source for retina | JPG | email, website, LinkedIn, Instagram rows |
| Body type | Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif | system fallback | 4.3 Typography still governs everywhere the web font loads |
| Disclaimer | 9px confidentiality notice | inline-styled table | on by default |
Verified against the brand manifest's signature settings: 2026-07-05.
- Logo: the animated By Default mark ships as a hosted GIF rather than the SVG. Variants: 4.1 Logo
- Colour: the card sits on one frozen warm background, because email HTML cannot read 4.2 Colour tokens
- The generator is the only source. Nobody hand-writes or hand-edits a signature, because a pasted copy forks the brand and drifts on the first colour or logo change.
Formats
Hosted assets. The logo GIF and contact icons are served from https://assets.bydefault.studio/email/signature/, a host built for URLs that must outlive any site restructure. A signature already sitting in someone's sent folder can never be edited, so its image URLs are permanent: the bytes at a published path never change, and a redesigned asset gets a new filename instead. The copies committed here are what the generator previews from.
Tools
- Email Signature: generates the signature and copies it straight into Gmail, Apple Mail, or Outlook
Don't
Don't hand-build a signature
The generator is the only source. A pasted-together copy forks the brand and drifts on the first colour or logo change.
Don't swap the GIF for an SVG or PNG
Mail clients render neither reliably. The hosted GIF is the tested asset. Every other format breaks in someone's inbox.
Don't expect brand fonts in the inbox
A signature that looks right only in your own client is broken for everyone else. Keep to the system fallback the generator sets.
Checklist
- Signature generated from the tool, not hand-edited
- Name and role correct; only the links you use are toggled on
- Pasted into the mail client, then a test sent to yourself
- Disclaimer kept unless there's a reason to drop it