Forum signature, 650x250

650x250 is the size most gaming and roleplay boards allow for a signature image, and it is roomy by the standards of everything else in this list. The temptation is to use the room. The thing worth remembering is that a signature is never the thing somebody came to look at: it sits under a post they are reading, in a thread they are following, and it gets about a second of attention.

That makes the useful contents narrow: the server name large enough to read at a glance, the tagline as a single short line, and the invite. The full scene has room to breathe at this ratio, which is why signatures tend to be the nicest-looking format in a pack, but the lockup is still the point.

File size is the practical constraint. Boards enforce signature limits far more strictly than they enforce dimensions, and a limit between 500KB and 1MB is common on older vBulletin installs. The animated signature is built at 18fps over 3.6 seconds with a 192-colour palette and comes in under 6MB, which suits modern XenForo and Invision boards. If your board is stricter, upload the still PNG, which is a few hundred kilobytes and loses nothing but the motion.

Check your board's rules before you upload. Some cap width at 500 pixels rather than 650, some disallow animation in signatures entirely, and a few count the signature against your post's image allowance. A board that strips animation will show the first frame, which is composed to stand on its own for exactly that reason.