If you've been to the asylum, you surely will have noticed the images below people's posts. They're signatures, personal images which are nice for identification and adding a personal touch to people's posts. In most cases signatures feature the name of the owner (hence the name) and maybe a witty quote, like "I used to be schizophrenic, but we're okay now" or "play.fiddle.learn" or "specialization is for insects" or "If you can't convice, confuse" or "~Binary is best~" (see where you can find 'em!)
The reason why you're looking up this FAQ is (propably/hopefully) since you want to make a sig of your own and that you're wondering wether there are guidelines or rules.
In general, it's a bit showing off your PS skills, you try to make a pretty picture out of it. In my opinion, a perfect sig would:
a) be not higher than 64 pixels, and not wider than 400 pixels (theoretically 500 pixels, before the horizontal scrollbars of death turn up) but please don't make your sig both 64 pixels high and 400 wide, make it less high as it gets wider.
b) small in bytesize. Below 10KB is perfect, below 20Kb is acceptable, below 30 KB would be okay if you don't change sigs every-so-often and 40KB would be the maximum. Remember, some members here are still on dialup and it may take them a lot of time to download all the sigs if they're humongously big.
c) it shouldn't clash with the colorscheme of the forum.
This sig may cause retina burns, since the green stands really out against he darker color of the forum.
Whereas this sig uses the exact (well, almost) colors the forum has, and blends in with the forum nicely.
d) Please use some transparency. In everyday surfing we see a lot of square, ugly banners, so please don't do that here.
e) The sig should match both forum colors, darker and lighter.
f) (result of d & e) use *.gifs for your sigs. *jpg doesn't support transparency.
g) and sometimes people like to add a tagline (see above) to their sigs.
h) also optional: linking your homepage to your sig. an example:
