It has been said that a great deal of insight into an individual's personality and character can be determined by careful study of their signature. Indeed, this science of graphoanalysis is used by businesses to screen potential employees, by law enforcement to assist in profiling, and by counselors to better understand their patients.
No longer is this science restricted to the experts, however. This document demonstrates the methodology of signature analysis by analyzing step-by-step the following signature that was chosen at random from postings on the Internet:
The individual under study shall simply be referred to as "the subject", in order to protect his identity.
Proceeding through the signature from left to right, the first item of note is the city where the subject lives (1). Not only does the subject specify the city and the state, but also the country. Most people, if they even thought their address was important enough to mention at all, would have settled for just the city and the state. This indicates that the subject has an unusual obsession with geography. Immediately following the address is the URL of the subject's Internet "home page" (2), no doubt given to lure Internet users to read whatever rants and commentary he has felt like posting.
The subject is clearly an Internet old-timer, since he spaces out his signature with the assumption that every letter and space is of equal width (3). In the old non-graphical days of the Internet this may have been a safe assumption, but today's modern computers render text in such a way that this is no longer the case. In other words, because today's proportional fonts don't display the spacing as intended, the signature might appear messy and staggered, instead of neat and aligned as shown in the figure above. Nonetheless, the subject stubbornly persists in trying to space out his text just as he might have done in 1992.
In the final portion of the signature, the pieces begin to fall into place, describing a deeply troubled individual. It is quite common for individuals to include witty quotes in their signatures, but the subject's choice of quotes seems to shun proper sleep in favor of consuming caffeine (4) -- a sign of an addiction problem with the widely available stimulant. Even more interesting is the subject's attribution of the quote to himself! (5) This could very well be an early warning sign of a collapse into schizophrenia.
Combining these details, it is possible to paint a picture of the subject's personality. The subject is obsessed with geography, so he probably makes frequent, spontaneous road trips across the country, living off of gas station coffee, instead of food, to feed his need for caffeine. His desire for caffeine and his Internet background probably means he works today as programmer. (A programmer is a person who converts coffee into software.) Finally, from his self-referencing quotation, he is likely to often rant about senseless subjects after staying up all night while speaking of himself in the third person. In short, this is probably not the kind of person whom you should trust to take care of your cat for a weekend.