Accordingly, they confined the membership to a few and required that new members shall be, so far as possible, "representative men," and that at least five should be in the first half of their class.The opening remarks of the Signet's minutes state: "On Tuesday evening, November 1, 1870, a meeting was held at 10 Grays Hall preliminary to the organization of a senior society, which was to afford to a select number a pleasant means of intercourse with each other, not to be expected from the illiberal policy of the only society of reputation existing."

These first members formed the society's admissions criteria to transcend the social politics that they perceived as dominating in the Final Club system.

Today, those membership criteria are still present in the club's constitution mandating that members "shall be chosen about their intellectual, literary and artistic ability and achievements."

[1] The emblem which appears over the door of the Signet includes a beehive and bees, and a legend in Ancient Greek: μουσικήν ποίει και εργάζου -- "Create art, and live it."

[1] The Signet eschews initiation rituals common to Harvard's Final Clubs and the Lampoon in favor of an induction, during which each new member receives a red rose.

The Signet maintains a library of these works, which were originally literary, but now include programs or other artifacts marking the performance of music, films, or displays of the visual artistry of members.

The two organizations sporadically hold a lawn croquet tournament, for which a handled and engraved silver pudding cup in a mahogany case serves as the trophy.

[4] Architectural historian Douglass Shand-Tucci includes an in-depth discussion of Signet's building in his history of Harvard's campus, relating the oddity that a firm known for its preeminence in Gothic Revival was employed to renovate an 1820s Colonial residence (converted in 1880 to a Victorian clubhouse) into a neo-Federal structure with baroque details.

Regarding its distinctive features, Shand-Tucci writes: It is in feeling wildly Baroque (of all things)—a welcome touch of flamboyance for what would otherwise have been a rather staid clubhouse for the Signet... the graphic quality of Cram & Goodhue's and LaRose's new frontispiece is actually rather reminiscent of book design (not to mention the Palladianism of several Tory Row mansions), and centers on a two story pedimented Ionic pavilion displaying the Signet arms...