button maker
make an 88×31 web button — the little link badges sites used to trade to point at each other. bitmap type, no smoothing, animation optional.
an 88×31 button is a small image, exactly 88 pixels wide and 31 pixels tall, that links back to a site. two sites would swap them and display each other's button to say "we like this place." this tool builds one and gives you the png or gif plus the embed code.
start from
a preset changes the look only — whatever you have typed stays put.
text
pixel edges snaps every letter to whole pixels, the way a bitmap font is meant to look. off, the browser smooths each glyph the way it does anywhere else.
color
palette
these are the colors most used across about 6,000 real 88×31 buttons, counted by pixel. the greys are the windows desktop; the flat red, blue and yellow are what the era reached for.
click a swatch to set background
period accuracy
web-safe colors crushes the image into the 216-color cube; about a third of the pixels in real buttons land on those colors, so it is a period constraint rather than a rule anyone actually kept.
effects
shape & icon
preview & export
preview paused for reduced motion — the exported file still animates.
animation
any of these turns the export into a looping gif.