[HN Gopher] Famous Signatures Through History
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Famous Signatures Through History
Author : elliotbnvl
Score : 44 points
Date : 2026-02-19 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (signatory.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (signatory.app)
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| 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.
| whycome wrote:
| This is cool. It seems hard to add just dots to signature? It
| may be some kind of delay waiting for a touch action.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| 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.
| pimlottc wrote:
| 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...
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| Antibabelic wrote:
| Famous signatures or just signatures of the famous? Because I'm
| surprised there's no Lucas Cranach the Elder dragon signature for
| example.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| The latter, but now it's going to be the former because you
| just nerdsniped me with the precision of a Navy SEAL.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| 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
| donkeyboy wrote:
| 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".
| lopis wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_VII_of_Spain_si...
|
| This is hilarious
| InitialLastName wrote:
| What am I missing? Spain is still a monarchy [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felipe_VI
| pimlottc wrote:
| Presumedly they meant when Spain was an absolute monarchy,
| instead of a constitutional monarch
| donkeyboy wrote:
| My bad
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| Ahh good one, I added this in! That is amazing.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| A lot of spanish kings used that formula to sign, not only
| Ferdinand VII.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| "That's not sloppiness -- that's your signature finding itself."
|
| Thanks ChatGPT...
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| Good catch, missed that.
|
| edit: went through and de-LLMified it, mostly, just for you :)
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| 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
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| >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.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| > 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.
| v4r wrote:
| 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.
| mobilene wrote:
| 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.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| 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).
| fenomas wrote:
| 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)
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Vonnegut also managed to design the logo for Claude half a
| century before it existed [0].
|
| 0: https://astrofella.wordpress.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/01/...
| beezle wrote:
| 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.
| davidcollantes wrote:
| 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.
| Xerox9213 wrote:
| Also on FF in Windows.
| synlatexc wrote:
| 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.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| 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...
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| That is wild. Hahaha.
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