getimiskon's space

Something I have recently worked on are a bunch of 88x31 buttons for the 512kb club. They aren't entirely my creation, but rather a collaborative work, which everyone involved seems to have enjoyed. I personally enjoy making web buttons as well. It's interesting what can be made in such a limited space. It's like a form of pixel art if you think about it.

A few days ago, I collaborated with Daudix in a small project. In a Matrix chat we happen to be at, he posted a bunch of web buttons for the 512kb club, made in Aseprite. While I liked the idea, the original design of the buttons was looking a bit too plain to me.

So I decided to experiment with the design a bit. I started GIMP, which is the tool of my choice and started tweaking. First, I made the buttons more even, by centering the split. Then, I changed the text. The text on the left side of the button looked alright to me, so I decided to change the justification of the text on the right side to match the other side.

Then I started tweaking the colors. While black and white don't look that bad on such a small button, it's not ideal for such a colorful button. So I decided to change it. At first, I had to change the color settings from Indexed to RGB. I think Aseprite exported the buttons with a specific palette, which didn't work with what I was going to do. The way I work with the colors is that I use a lighter variant of the main colors on the highlights at the top-left side and a darker variant on the shadows, at the bottom-right side.

So, I posted the buttons, and Daudix liked my tweaks. After some more tweaking, he created the pull request for the buttons on GitHub, where I was credited as well. We didn't wait too long, and we got a very nice response from the maintainer of the 512kb club.

What I got from this, is that if you have something good to contribute to a project, even a small change like improving web buttons or contributing snippets of code, do it. Even that can be appreciated by people.