Students and faculty now have a resource to make their email signatures look more professional—the new E-mail Signature Creator.
The signature creator came from the Marketing and Communications Department as a branding effort. Derek Hall, vice president of marketing and communications, said they saw a similar thing on another university’s website and set out to make one for NMU. Hall sees the uniformity of signatures as a benefit of the creator.
“In the past—I’ve been here two and a half years—people could create any type of signature they wanted,” Hall said.
The email generator can be accessed by going to the Marketing and Communications page of the university website and going to the “resources” tab on the left hand side.
When creating a signature there are many options to choose from, including the academic logo or the athletic logo. From there, the name, title and department are added. More options include adding a phone number, office address, university address and website. The generator also includes a custom option to add a field not specified in the options.
Sophomore computer science major Britney Reese is a web development intern within the marketing department who created the signature creator. The signatures give students the opportunity to appear more professional, she said.
“I hope it gives students another tool to make their emails look better and be presented as more official,” Reese said. “It can be challenging to try and write an email and give off the tone that you want.” Reese tested generated signatures on systems like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Mac Mail and the NMU email client Webmail.
“The main challenge was getting it to work in a bunch of different email clients,” Reese said. “Email is one of the trickier things because everyone tries to do things their own way and you have to cater to all the different email clients.”
Hall praised Reese’s work on project and said it’s a great way for students and faculty to show their NMU pride.
“We all represent NMU in some form or fashion,” Hall said. “Email is the way we communicate, so if a student chooses to use it then great.”
