Awesome Free Web Button Creator
Loes Knetsch ©
This awesome and easy, free online to use button creator has been around for a couple of years now. It started all back in 2009, as a school project. Paul was asked to make use of the PHP GD library, to dynamically generate buttons on web pages. He thought the project was cool, and that it would be a good idea to keep working on it. Da Button Factory is still a fantastic tool, especially for folks who don’t know much about CSS.
Website: Da Button Factory
Founder: Paul
Location: France
Da Button Factory is a free and very easy to use tool which you can use to create beautiful buttons for your website. The buttons are provided in different formats. You can download them as an image, but you can also embed the CSS code. You can adjust the buttons to your website colors. Give them a shadow effect, borders and change the text type.
A bit technical, but this is where it started: The GD Graphics Library is a graphics software library by Thomas Boutell and others for dynamically manipulating images. Its native programming language is ANSI C, but it has interfaces for many other programming languages. It can create GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and WBMPs. GD originally stood for “GIF Draw”. GD can create images composed of lines, arcs, text (using program-selected fonts), other images, and multiple colors. Read more on WIKIPEDIA
Paul is a freelance web developer from France. Back in 2009, CSS (the language used to style & specify the layout of web pages) was much more limited than it is now. Rounded corners, shadows, and color gradients, for instance, were newly specified, and few browsers implemented them. So if you wanted such things, you had to resort to using image files. Such a need was common. But making such images meant having to use an image editor (like Photoshop), and this requires skill and is time-consuming.
Paul: I thought that it would be helpful, for myself (who was already planning to
become a web developer) and for others, to have a simple solution that would
cover 80% of the “I want a pretty button/box” cases, without having to use a
heavyweight image editor, and without taking much time. Hence Da Button
Factory was born 🙂
Nowadays, web developers can do much more in CSS, so to them, Da Button Factory is a less useful tool than it once was. But there are a lot of people creating websites, who don’t understand how to implement CSS and to them this tool is a great help.
Since 2013 is the CSS code output (you can see it when you click on “Embed” on the site) added. Although, an experienced web developer can end up with such code more quickly than by using the site. Having instant visual feedback like “do the colors look nice?” for instance, can still be helpful, though. And there are other media where you may want pretty buttons and where CSS does not apply. Some people use generated buttons from the DaButtonFactory site for their video game interfaces.
In 2015, Paul made Da Button Factory work nicely on phone and tablets, it’s called “responsive web design”. Nowadays, it’s very important, because more and more people are using mobile devices. Since that upgrade, there have been no major changes to the program.
In may 2018, Da Button Factory has been fully translated into French, and Paul considers Da Button Factory to be quite done as it is. The whole site has been translated into French. Le site complet a été traduit en français.
You may find more information about the history of the site on
Dabuttonfactory.
You often see buttons with multiple lines. You cannot create buttons with multiple lines with Da Button Factory,
but you can create those with ImageFu.com button maker.
The buttons you create on Da Button Factory are copyright free.
You are free to use them for any purpose, including commercial ones, without restriction.
If you embed them on a website or app, mentioning you used Da Button Factory is appreciated but not mandatory.
DaButtonFactory runs on donations. All the work that has been done and the costs for this school project and later on, which is so very useful for you and me, is offered to you without any obligation. The Da Button Factory does have a donation page, which you can find when you click the button below ↓
Other Amazing Free Programs:
- YouTube
- Picture Editors