alt.hn

2/19/2026 at 1:49:49 PM

Famous Signatures Through History

 https://signatory.app/#famous-signatures

by elliotbnvl

2/19/2026 at 4:12:25 PM

I love the instructions at the bottom:

  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. For everything else, go as abstract as you want.
The guy who was Secretary of the Treasury after Geithner and before Mnuchin, Jack Lew, eventually must have taken that advice [0].

Because until he changed it, he had a spectacularly hilarious signature, much derided at the time, especially for the fact that it would have made its way onto US currency [1].

I'm still kind of sad he changed it though, would have loved to have a twenty with that signature on it in my office.

0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/05/07/182033320...

1: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/01/jack-lews-terrible-s...

by jihadjihad

2/19/2026 at 4:15:26 PM

That is wild. Hahaha.

by elliotbnvl

2/19/2026 at 2:19:07 PM

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”.

by donkeyboy

2/19/2026 at 2:43:45 PM

What am I missing? Spain is still a monarchy [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felipe_VI

by InitialLastName

2/19/2026 at 3:10:42 PM

Presumedly they meant when Spain was an absolute monarchy, instead of a constitutional monarch

by pimlottc

2/19/2026 at 3:05:45 PM

Ahh good one, I added this in! That is amazing.

by elliotbnvl

2/19/2026 at 4:26:08 PM

A lot of spanish kings used that formula to sign, not only Ferdinand VII.

by PowerElectronix

2/19/2026 at 1:51:45 PM

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.

by elliotbnvl

2/19/2026 at 3:12:51 PM

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...

by pimlottc

2/19/2026 at 7:51:32 PM

I wish Preview had a better way to import signatures. I was messing around one day and made one I really liked with Apple Notes on the iPad. It looks like I eventually got it in Preview, but it doesn't look as clean as it did in Notes.

I think I ended up printing it out and holding it up to my webcam, but it wasn't easy. I remember fighting with it a fair bit and I'm still not happy with the results. You'd think Apple Notes and Preview would be able to talk to each other enough to import directly.

by al_borland

2/19/2026 at 2:33:05 PM

This is cool. It seems hard to add just dots to signature? It may be some kind of delay waiting for a touch action.

by whycome

2/19/2026 at 3:06:31 PM

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.

by elliotbnvl

2/19/2026 at 3:54:38 PM

On Firefox, under Linux, the carrousel of signatures is not showing a navigation (mouse driven). Only way I got it to work was using the keyboard arrow keys.

by davidcollantes

2/19/2026 at 4:52:36 PM

Also on FF in Windows.

by Xerox9213

2/19/2026 at 3:05:38 PM

>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.

by PopAlongKid

2/19/2026 at 4:15:50 PM

> I don't think this is true

Other cultures, other rules. I can testify that there are countries where this is definitely a requirement.

Hence I have an id card which does not bear my signature but a legible rendering of my name.

by Towaway69

2/19/2026 at 4:08:04 PM

There's also Geronimo's block-letter signature, which for some reason moves me. Sense in it his resigned adaptation to a shifting world and adoption of a new language, after years of resistance.

by synlatexc

2/19/2026 at 3:21:51 PM

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.

by mobilene

2/19/2026 at 5:20:12 PM

Same here. I can even use an Adobe Acrobat Pro (desktop version) tool to insert it in a document in a secure way (requires a password).

by PopAlongKid

2/19/2026 at 3:30:22 PM

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.

by beezle

2/19/2026 at 3:20:04 PM

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.

by v4r

2/19/2026 at 2:11:49 PM

Famous signatures or just signatures of the famous? Because I'm surprised there's no Lucas Cranach the Elder dragon signature for example.

by Antibabelic

2/19/2026 at 3:08:52 PM

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:

  magick cranach-autograph.png -colorspace Gray -threshold 70% cranach.pbm
  potrace cranach.pbm -s -o cranach.svg --tight --alphamax 1.0 --opttolerance 0.5

by elliotbnvl

2/19/2026 at 2:13:47 PM

The latter, but now it’s going to be the former because you just nerdsniped me with the precision of a Navy SEAL.

by elliotbnvl

2/19/2026 at 2:49:19 PM

“That's not sloppiness — that's your signature finding itself.”

Thanks ChatGPT…

by the_gastropod

2/19/2026 at 3:04:04 PM

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

by laweijfmvo

2/19/2026 at 2:52:29 PM

Good catch, missed that.

edit: went through and de-LLMified it, mostly, just for you :)

by elliotbnvl