I recently helped a professor create a digital signature for official letters. You can also easily do this with a camera.
- Sign a clean, white sheet of paper with a broad stroke pen.
- Place the signature on a flat surface and saturate it with light.
- Take a picture of the signature with the camera as close as possible without casting a shadow. In this case, I used an iPhone 3GS with Camera+, a third party camera-control app that provides additional features for editing photos.
- Copy or email the photo to yourself.
- Using Microsoft Word, click on Insert > Photo > File, select the signature photo. Adjust its size accordingly.
A note about using Camera+. The app allowed me to lighten the image and crop it. However, I also had to use The Gimp’s brightness and contrast controls on my Mac to create a signature that stood out from a solid white background. If you get more light on the original signature, you shouldn’t have to do additional post processing. It would be nice if Camera+ added basic brightness/contrast sliders for further image adjustment. Perhaps the developers will choose to do this in a future release.
Dynamic Subspace 