Its missing the funniest signature. Back when Spain still had monarchy, King Ferdinand VII simply signed his signature “Yo el Rey” - literally “I, the king”.
I think that's on the low side. My signature got locked in during my early twenties, when I worked at a commercial AM/FM radio station. I had to sign various transmitter logs (FCC requirement), about six times every three hours as I recall, and I worked six days a week, so a lot of signatures. It still took a while before I could sign consistently without thinking about it (muscle memory).
>One last thing: consider where you'll use it. Legal documents and contracts need a signature that's at least partially legible — someone should be able to connect it to your printed name.
I don't think this is true, although you may need witnesses to your legal signature if the best you can do is sign with an "X". After all, there are people without hands, blind, or other disabilities that might prevent a "normal" signature.
And these days, with paper checks becoming uncommon and credit card payments skipping the paper receipt to sign, how often do people get the chance to sign anything on paper?
>But for everyday use, emails, creative work? It can be as abstract as you like.
I don't think trying to maintain two different signatures makes a lot of sense, but if you are pasting an image (e.g. emails), I suppose it's not that much trouble.
I date myself.. back when I was but a young whippersnapper the NY Post published a series of copies of Nixon's signatures from when he entered office until his resignation. The change was enormous.
Made this last night because I needed a signature drawing tool but a Google didn’t reveal any mobile friendly pages with a <15s interaction and no email gate, to get a nice looking signature.
The historical signatures were a nice touch Claude helped me put together for SEO.
This was surprisingly tricky, but fixed! The issue was that short tap strokes were being fed through the stroke-rendering library (perfect-freehand), which applies start/end taper over a configurable length. When the total stroke distance is shorter than the combined taper length, the stroke tapers to nothing — so dots just disappeared. The fix detects tap-like strokes and renders them directly as small ellipses, bypassing the stroke pipeline.
Having a graphic file of your signature is hella useful. I did it the old school way thirty years ago -- I signed my name on paper until I liked it, scanned it, created .gif and .bmp files. Still use that.
I remember there was a very nice website to draw things with touchpad that was mentioned on HN but I couldn't find it in my history. It could be used for signature too I suppose.
Ok, got Cranach's in (plus some more "famous" signatures, about 10 more). Cranach's might be my personal favorite signature of the lot. Dragon imagery, minimalism, cool backstory.
There were no SVGs of it available online so I had to trace a PNG but Claude handled that like a champ with a combination of imagemagick and potrace:
The closing was obviously written by AI regardless of the punctuation. Also gave me a laugh about adding a flourish to make the signature harder to forge
Its missing the funniest signature. Back when Spain still had monarchy, King Ferdinand VII simply signed his signature “Yo el Rey” - literally “I, the king”.
What am I missing? Spain is still a monarchy [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felipe_VI
Presumedly they meant when Spain was an absolute monarchy, instead of a constitutional monarch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_VII_of_Spain_si...
This is hilarious
Ahh good one, I added this in! That is amazing.
Adding my all-time favorite signature - Kurt Vonnegut, who often (not always) built a caricature of himself into his signature. What a flex!
E.g.: https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/...
(I think later in life his signatures lost the cigarette)
>Fifty repetitions usually gets you there.
I think that's on the low side. My signature got locked in during my early twenties, when I worked at a commercial AM/FM radio station. I had to sign various transmitter logs (FCC requirement), about six times every three hours as I recall, and I worked six days a week, so a lot of signatures. It still took a while before I could sign consistently without thinking about it (muscle memory).
>One last thing: consider where you'll use it. Legal documents and contracts need a signature that's at least partially legible — someone should be able to connect it to your printed name.
I don't think this is true, although you may need witnesses to your legal signature if the best you can do is sign with an "X". After all, there are people without hands, blind, or other disabilities that might prevent a "normal" signature.
And these days, with paper checks becoming uncommon and credit card payments skipping the paper receipt to sign, how often do people get the chance to sign anything on paper?
>But for everyday use, emails, creative work? It can be as abstract as you like.
I don't think trying to maintain two different signatures makes a lot of sense, but if you are pasting an image (e.g. emails), I suppose it's not that much trouble.
I date myself.. back when I was but a young whippersnapper the NY Post published a series of copies of Nixon's signatures from when he entered office until his resignation. The change was enormous.
Made this last night because I needed a signature drawing tool but a Google didn’t reveal any mobile friendly pages with a <15s interaction and no email gate, to get a nice looking signature.
The historical signatures were a nice touch Claude helped me put together for SEO.
The Preview app in macOS includes a nice signature tool. You can create a signature using the touchpad or digitize a written signature using a webcam
https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/fill-out-and-sign-pd...
This is cool. It seems hard to add just dots to signature? It may be some kind of delay waiting for a touch action.
This was surprisingly tricky, but fixed! The issue was that short tap strokes were being fed through the stroke-rendering library (perfect-freehand), which applies start/end taper over a configurable length. When the total stroke distance is shorter than the combined taper length, the stroke tapers to nothing — so dots just disappeared. The fix detects tap-like strokes and renders them directly as small ellipses, bypassing the stroke pipeline.
Having a graphic file of your signature is hella useful. I did it the old school way thirty years ago -- I signed my name on paper until I liked it, scanned it, created .gif and .bmp files. Still use that.
I remember there was a very nice website to draw things with touchpad that was mentioned on HN but I couldn't find it in my history. It could be used for signature too I suppose.
Famous signatures or just signatures of the famous? Because I'm surprised there's no Lucas Cranach the Elder dragon signature for example.
Ok, got Cranach's in (plus some more "famous" signatures, about 10 more). Cranach's might be my personal favorite signature of the lot. Dragon imagery, minimalism, cool backstory.
There were no SVGs of it available online so I had to trace a PNG but Claude handled that like a champ with a combination of imagemagick and potrace:
The latter, but now it’s going to be the former because you just nerdsniped me with the precision of a Navy SEAL.
“That's not sloppiness — that's your signature finding itself.”
Thanks ChatGPT…
The closing was obviously written by AI regardless of the punctuation. Also gave me a laugh about adding a flourish to make the signature harder to forge
Good catch, missed that.
edit: went through and de-LLMified it, mostly, just for you :)