Web-Safe Fonts for Email Signatures

An email signature is rendered by the recipient's email client, not the sender's, so it can only display fonts the recipient's device already has or the client is willing to load. Custom web fonts work in a few clients, notably Apple Mail and iOS Mail, and are ignored by Gmail and most Outlook versions; Outlook for Windows falls back to Times New Roman if the signature names no fallback. That is why signatures are set in web-safe fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Georgia, and Times New Roman are present on almost every Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android device. Sans-serif faces like Arial and Verdana read best at small sizes on screens. The usual practice is a font stack in the inline style that names the brand font first and a web-safe font after it, so clients that support the brand font use it and the rest degrade gracefully. Size matters as much as face: body lines around 12 to 14 pixels, the name slightly larger, and nothing below about 10 pixels even for disclaimers. Rendering text as an image to force a font is a common mistake, because it disappears when images are blocked and cannot be read by screen readers.