We built Marks & Signatures: find the maker behind a stamp on pottery, silver, jewelry and glass

Turn a plate over and you will often find a mark stamped, printed or scratched into the base: a crown, a few letters, a small anchor, a line of country wording. Brooches, spoons and vases carry them too. The mark says who made the piece, and roughly when and where. Reading it is the hard part. The reference material is spread across dozens of hobby and museum sites, each organised its own way, and most assume you already know the maker's name. That is usually what you are trying to find out.

So we built Marks & Signatures, a free site for identifying maker's marks, hallmarks and signatures on pottery, silver, jewelry and glass.

What it does

The antique mark identifier starts from what you can see, not from a name:

• A photo. Upload, drop or paste one, then crop and rotate it to the mark.
• What you can read. Type letters, a word or a short description such as "crown + Bavaria" or "blue anchor". Partial letters are fine.
• Details you can pick. Up to eight of 35 symbols, an outline, a colour, how the mark was made (impressed, printed, incised, painted, label, underglaze or overglaze), a country and a period.

The results are illustrated marks to compare with yours, grouped by maker. A maker page shows all of that maker's marks with their wording and dates, and the details that tell look-alikes apart. When a date isn't known, it says "undated".

What's inside

The photo and letter search covers 32,162 illustrated marks from 10,305 makers, taken from 15 collections that the Identify page names plus 922 marks added while researching popular makers.

• Pottery and porcelain: 22,223 marks from 3,950 makers
• Jewelry and gold: 5,883 marks from 4,829 makers
• Silver: 1,959 marks from 1,209 makers
• Glass: 1,914 marks from 282 makers
• Other maker marks (cast iron, furniture, lamps and more): 183 marks from 35 makers

The category pages count every record, including marks that exist only as text, so the silver hallmarks page lists 5,642 makers and 12,298 marks. Pictures link back to the page they came from. There are also more than 350 short guides, such as what STG means or how to date a Ball jar, and about 200 maker pages with a short history and look-alike marks.

Who it's for

• People sorting a box of inherited china, silver or jewelry.
• Flea-market and estate-sale regulars.
• Collectors comparing marks that look almost the same.

There is no account and nothing to pay. The site tells you who made a piece and roughly when, not what it is worth.

How it's built

It's a Next.js 16 site on Vercel, with the catalogue indexed ahead of time. For photos, a small image model (TinyCLIP, quantized) runs in a server function and turns your cropped picture into a 512-number fingerprint, which is compared with a stored fingerprint for each of the 32,162 marks. Typed letters and chosen details are combined with that score. The browser also tries to read letters with Tesseract.js, but that carries little weight, because stamped and glazed marks are hard to read. The symbol, outline and colour tags came partly from the sources' own descriptions and partly from software looking at the pictures. Treat the results as candidates to compare, not a verdict.

What's next

More makers, more guides, and fixes wherever a mark should have matched and didn't. If it came up empty for you, tell us in the comments what the mark looked like.

Try it at marksandsignatures.com with whatever is stamped on the bottom of your oldest plate.

This post was written with AI assistance and reviewed by the Pyxl team.