Button Madness
OK, so I went a little crazy with the new little buttons section that you’ll find towards the bottom of the menu bar. I’ve been wondering for months how these wonderous little buttons were created. It seems like everything and everyone has a little button of their own. So I set out to learn how these little gems are created.
First stop, a post I found on Bill Zeller’s minimal verbosity blog. Seems as though Bill created a PHP script that automated the creation of these buttons. Unfortunately, the post is about a year and a half old and just about every link in the post is dead. Luckily, there was at least one link that I found to be in working order.
That led me to Adam Kalsey’s Button Maker. Adam created a nice GUI for Bill’s button creation script. The tool allows you to enter values for the text, colors, borders and spacing. Once your values are all set and you submit the form, a nice little PNG will be created for you on the fly. You can tweak your image and then save it off for use on your site. Once you create one, you’ll feel the need to keep going and going. Trust me on this.
The limitation of this tool of course is that you’re limited to text only. If you’d like to incorporate something a little more complex into your button, just grab Jason Kottke’s Silkscreen font. Then start out with a blank 80×15 pixel canvas and have at it.
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