Ruled Contact and Ruled Classic Are Ready to Use
Two more layouts have been added to the signature builder. Both use a horizontal rule as their organizing element, which turns out to be the most reliable piece of structure available in an email client.
Ruled Contact
Name and role above the line, contact details below it, headshot to the left. The rule does the work that white space would do on a web page, which matters because email clients collapse spacing unpredictably and a border does not.
This is the layout to pick if your details run long: an agent, a manager, a union number and two phone numbers all sit comfortably under the rule without the top half turning into a paragraph.
Ruled Classic
The same idea with no photograph. Name set larger, role underneath, a rule, then a single tight line of contact details.
Do not skip this one because it lacks a headshot. There are contexts where a photograph in a signature is the wrong choice: writing to somebody senior who did not ask for it, corporate voice work where the buyer is not casting a face, and any thread that is already twelve messages long and does not need your face twelve times.
A lot of actors end up keeping two signatures for exactly this reason, one with a photograph for new contacts and one without for ongoing threads.
Why these are conservative on purpose
A signature is not a place to be interesting. It appears at the bottom of a message somebody is reading for another reason entirely, and its whole job is to be legible and to survive whatever client it lands in. The moment a layout becomes clever it becomes the thing that breaks in Outlook.
Both of these render correctly with images blocked, on a phone, in dark mode, and in the plain text fallback. That is a shorter list of achievements than it sounds and a longer list than most signatures manage.
Which to choose
If you are unsure, Ruled Contact. It is the most generally useful layout in the set. If your emails are mostly to people who already know what you look like, Ruled Classic.
Coming next: Grid Cells and Accent Bar, then Portrait Right and Monogram. Photograph treatments are covered in circular photos.
No website to link to yet? Create a free actor website first. A signature pointing nowhere is a wasted signature.
