It's time you upgrade your look... in your emails.
I'm Kat and I'm The Drunk Bridesmaid. Today I'm going to show you how you can create your own
custom Gmail signature so you can level up your professionalism and style. If you've got a Gmail
account, you can wow business contacts and impress potential employers with a custom Gmail signature
like the one I've created here. First we need to go to Google Docs. That's docs.google.com, and
click the create new document button at the bottom of the right corner of the page. Now we'll
insert a table and select the two by one option. Let's drop in our most
LinkedIn worthy headshot here, or if your email is associated with a brand,
you could sub this out with your company's logo, and if you prefer to keep your photo private you
could create your own logo with your initials. Here I'm dropping in my headshot. If you already
have a perfectly cropped image ready to go, just click insert image. I have a headshot
that I'd like to resize into a circle shape, so I'm going to delete this image
and instead click insert drawing. In your drawing, insert image. Here
I'm dragging a photo from my desktop. Click the crop tool to make your image a square and we're going to make the length the same
as the width, so I'll pull the bottom of the image up to 15 and now I can reposition the image.
Now click the crop button again and under shapes select the circle mask. Now if you save and close
to return to the Google Doc we're working in, the image now looks low resolution, and that's
annoying. If you experience this problem, we'll go back to the drawing by double clicking
on the image. Go to actions. Download jpeg. Save and close. Now delete your image and pull
the downloaded image into the cell. Now we're back to our high resolution quality. You'll need to
crop and resize a bit here to get it just right. At the top I'll want to add my name. Keep
in mind that in Google Docs you've got a lot of fonts to play with, but not every
font comes pre-installed on both Mac OS and Windows software so to be safe, I
recommend sticking to one of these fonts: Arial, Tahoma, Veranda, Trebuchet, Courier,
Lucinda, Times New Roman, Georgia, Palatino You can use other fonts outside of the list but
if the recipient of your email does not have that web font installed on their computer, they won't
see the email signature the way you designed it. A work around is to use whatever fancy font you
want, take a screenshot of it shift command 4 Now delete the text and drop your screenshot in
the cell instead. Wa-bam! Let's get even fancier and add a handwritten signature. There are two
ways to do this. One is to click insert drawing. Click select line and choose scribble Now you can draw your own signature But if you're like me and you don't have a
stylus pen and your signature just turned out like a toddler drew it, we'll delete this
and use the second method for Mac users. Open a pdf in the preview application. Here I've
just saved a blank Google Doc as a pdf for this example. Click show markup toolbar across the top
here. Click sign and create signature. Select the camera option and now you can write your signature
on a blank white piece of paper and upload the signature. Click save. Now screenshot your
signature and we'll pull the image into our table. Gorgeous. With the ability to connect your
social handles and link to your latest projects you're likely to gain more followers and
connect people with what you care about. So let's add our social links. Here I just ran
a quick Google search on social media icons and right clicked on the icons that
I wanted to save to my desktop. There are a lot of social media icon packs that
you can download where a designer has already sized all of the icons and styled them to look
the same. I stayed away from that for the purpose of this tutorial here today because a lot of
those require a membership or a subscription or a payment and we're doing this whole
tutorial for free. But hold up a minute! Before we jump into this next section, I want to
go over something that tripped me up so you don't have to go through the same frustrating experience
I did. If you do any cropping to your social media icons in the Google Doc we're working with or
even when you insert drawing and crop there then paste your signature in Gmail, all your
detailed work has been totally thrown out of whack. For me this wasn't a noticeable issue with
my profile photo but it created a major headache when I was trying to get lots of tiny icons to
line up in a row here and all be the same size. I played around in Google Docs quite a bit with
cropping and trying to save the image in different ways to make this work in Gmail and I kept running
into the same problem so I think it might just be an issue with the signature parameters in Gmail.
You might not have this problem, but if you do, a great work around is to use another free
program to crop and edit your photos before you drag it in to the project we're working in.
Here I use the smartphone app PicsArt, which you can download and crop photos for free. I cropped
as much of the white border around the icon out and made sure the icon is saved as a square, then
I dragged each icon into my Google Doc. Now you can click on the image, and in the image options
type in a height of 0.7 centimeters for each icon. You're going to see this makes all the
difference when we paste our work in Gmail. Now click on the icon and insert link.
Paste your social link here and apply. Great, so we've got this cropping and sizing thing
down. Now we can get creative with how we make an impression. If you recently wrote a film and it
won some laurels, you could add an icon of the laurels and link to a download of your new film.
Now let's call attention to what makes you tick. Whether it's your job title or a recent award
you've won or a special skill you've mastered, list one to three of these items here. Say you
manage your band's email account. You could list new EP out next month with a hyperlink to
pre-order the album. Just hit return and create a new line for the text and make sure you're
working with one of the fonts we've discussed using earlier. Keep it simple. If you feel the
need to elaborate, hyperlink. And this is a great place for you to include your website or a link
to your agent or your company if you have one. You may need to adjust your sizing several times
to get your signature just right. This may require some patience. I made mine with .7 centimeter
icons and nine point font, but do what looks good to you. Finally, to finesse my design I'd like to
add a colored line between my photo and the text and get rid of all the rest of the borders
as I think that looks nice stylistically. Click on the line and in the toolbar you can
adjust the color and borderline thickness. I'd like to get rid of the rest of the borders, so I'll click on each one and
change the color to white. Now let's transfer our design over to Gmail.
Copy your table by dragging your mouse over your design and hitting command c or right click
copy. Now in your Gmail account, go to settings. See all settings and scroll down to the signature
section. Click create new. Paste your design. For new emails, make sure your new signature
is selected. I don't want my signature to show up on every single email reply I make so I've
turned this off for replies and forward use. Save changes and click compose to
view your fabulous new signature. And yes, if you're one of those people
that primarily communicates in gifs, you can totally swap out your photo for a
gif and it'll show up in your signature. I hope your new Gmail signature looks next level. For more tips and tutorials, be sure
to subscribe to The Drunk Bridesmaid. Cheers.
