Signs accept far more than plain letters. Between dye, glow ink and pasted symbols, they are the most flexible decoration in the game.
Colouring a sign
Right-click a placed sign with any dye and the text takes that colour. All sixteen dyes work, and each side of the sign can be a different colour. Every dye and where it comes from is listed in our colours and dyes reference.
Making signs readable at night
A glow ink sac applied to a sign makes the text glow, so it stays readable in the dark and from a distance. Ordinary ink sacs remove the glow again. Glow plus a dark dye such as black gives the strongest outline effect.
Symbols
Signs display any character your keyboard or clipboard can produce, which is why decorative symbols are so common on server spawn areas. Arrows, stars, bullets, box-drawing characters and currency marks all render fine. Copy the symbol from anywhere and paste it into the sign — there is no special in-game menu for it.
Keep an eye on the character limit per line. Wide symbols eat the available width faster than letters do, and anything past the limit is cut without warning.
Colour codes on signs
In normal survival play, sign colour comes from dye rather than from the section-sign codes used in chat. Codes on signs are a command block and datapack technique: place the sign with a command that sets its text as a JSON component, and you can colour individual words rather than the whole side.
Our colour text generator outputs exactly that JSON component alongside the ordinary code formats, so you can build the string, copy it, and drop it straight into the command.
Both sides count
Signs have been double-sided for a while now, so you can dye, glow and write each face independently. Hanging signs work the same way and take the same dye.