Not-Quite-“Antipixel” Buttons

A while back, I changed some of my links (mostly the reciprocal and “advertising” ones, as opposed to the “regular reading” ones) to feature 80x15 buttons. Of course, they’re based in part on the ones originally developed by Antipixel (as nearly as I can tell, anyway), but I opted to pretty much throw out one of the basic ideas behind the originals: Size.

I’m not talking about dimensions — no, they’re still the standard 80x15. But file size. Don’t get me wrong — I still do my best to keep them as small as possible, but that factor is secondary to the notion of aesthetics.

I hate aliased type. Bugs the hell out of me. One of those things that’s irritated me since my early days in design. No, it’s not so irritating when it’s that small, but still, if I could make the text legible at that size with antialiased text, I was damn sure going to do it.

I’ve just added a button for Prometheus Unleashed there on the left. But the problem there was the site’s name — aliased or antialiased, there was no way I was gonna fit it all on there (trust me to be needlessly long-winded). And abbreviating it just seemed awkward; after all, just “Prometheus” didn’t really seem accurate, and I wasn’t about to start shortening it to “PU” (an unfortunate abbreviation you’d think I would have been smart enough to notice back at the beginning). So that led to my using an animated gif file to fit the full text. Add to that the dilemma of what to make the site’s “picture” — fire seemed an obvious choice — and a few more frames were added to the sequence.

So there you go. Take it, or not. Rail against my decision in the comments section. Or just go about your day, aware that obsessing about such insignificant matters is really a waste of time.

I don’t even know why I’ve written so much about this. I’ll try to find something meatier to talk about.