88x31 buttons are a thing!

When browsing Neocities sites, I noticed that a lot of them had 88x31 buttons linking to other sites. It's a retro thing. You won't see this on mainstream websites like business sites, but it's interesting that you see so many of these buttons on people's personal sites and informal blogs. 

If anyone is thinking of making their own buttons, you should look into 88x31 buttons and button makers.

This trend seems to be a little bit niche, in that you probably wouldn't see it if you weren't on sites like neocities where people get to be both informal and creative. 

It also seems to be a bit tricky to do right, where it looks retro cool as opposed to just old. If you're interested in web design or in design in general, it may be worth looking into this trend and playing around with it. From looking around, it seems that it looks natural in the right environment - a bit like a polar bear in the Arctic. But if you saw a polar bear in your local home town, it would look really weird. And scary. So in those fun retro sites the 88x31 buttons look like a natural fit.

Overall, I probably wouldn't use the buttons a whole lot, or only in a fun informal setting. But it's definitely an interesting trend. 

Speaking of web design trends, while I love typography and can drool over fonts for longer than I should, I don't think typography-only designs are great. Many people love pictures and are very visually oriented. So if you have text as the main message, no matter how beautiful it looks in a large standout font, it's not going to really stay in most people's heads. Unless they're writers or very word oriented. I've noticed this a lot on corporate sites which are trying to look cool or minimalist. They might look great at first glance, but no-one is going to remember what the text said later. 

At some point, you can take minimalist too far, and I think once you don't have any images at all on your home page, you've gone too far. Of course there are always exceptions to any rule, so perhaps there are some good minimalist home pages that don't have images. It doesn't need a big hero image, but in my opinion it needs something image-wise, even if it's just a few icons at the bottom of the page for navigation. 

There are a few technical things to consider too - both accessibility and ability to not have third party cookies should be taken into account. Not so much for privacy reasons, but rather because if someone can't navigate a website easily using their standard settings (whether that's tabbing through content using a keyboard, or with third party cookies turned off) then they won't bother going to that site anymore.