Free Graphics: Fun Badges and Seals for Your Blog
“Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”
Blazing Saddles, 1974
Clearly the bandito who uttered that immortal line from Blazing Saddles didn’t have a blog. If he did, he’d be thrilled to have access to these free graphics, which include some pretty cool official-looking badges and seals.
I’m a real advocate of lightening up when it comes to blogging, which is neither rocket science nor the cure for cancer (unless, of course, you actually blog about rocket science or cancer cures). But even if your subject matter is serious, it’s often still appropriate to have a little fun with your content.
The following free Web graphics applications can help you interject a little of that fun into your blog. They allow you to choose your own text and colors to create badges and seals that can be used as icons, to illustrate a blog post or even as part of your blog design.
The Says-It.com Official Badge Generator offers three badge styles: fire, police and sheriff. You can use any colors you can think of, because they have an intuitive HTML hex-code color selector for each component of the badge.
If the term “HTML hex-code color selector” intimidates you, don’t worry. As you can see from the image to the right, their color selector only requires that you drag icons to the color you want. For me, playing with the colors was part of the fun; there’s just something humorous about a purple and teal sheriff’s badge.
I played with this tool for hours because it’s like a coloring book for grown-ups. Except when I was done playing, I had a collection of cool usable Web graphics.
The Says-It.com Official Seal Generator is equally fun. I played around with this for my movie trivia blog and ended up with an icon I now use on the home page. Here are some of the designs I came up with:
The Official Seal Generator uses the same interface and tools as the Official Badge Generator, so once you’ve used one, you’ll know how to use the other. They’re oh-so-easy to use, so as a newly appointed member of the Web Police (and I have the badge to prove it), I command you to go and have fun with these free Web graphics tools!
Update (5-21-08): New designs have been added, so there are now five badge and seven seal designs.
You might also be interested in these other resources:
- Free clip art
- Free photos
- Free cartoons
- Avatar Central, your home for free images, image software and information about avatars
- Guide to online social networking
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March 22nd, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Hi,
I’m not sure if you have this one in your collection or not:
cooltext.com
its excellent and 100% free.
Hope you like it 😉
March 22nd, 2008 at 7:10 pm
That is a cool resource. I especially like the ability to make Web 2.0 buttons. Thanks for sharing. 🙂
March 24th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
That seal generator site is cool! I was pleasantly surprised to see the variety of icons you can choose from. They even have one for “House”!
March 24th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Hi, JD. If I didn’t have other things to do, I’d probably spend half my day playing with both those generators!
April 1st, 2008 at 1:18 am
Hi,
Can you blog review for our website,
http://www.freeiconsdownload.com
Free Icon Download Offers Over 230 High Quality Royalty Free icons Set, Everything is free there and they are all useful.
Many Thanks
April 27th, 2008 at 5:25 am
Very good information 🙂
May 20th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Thanks for the glowing review! Just FYI, I recently added a couple of new badge designs to the badge generator and a bunch of new design options to the official seal generator, I hope you like them.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:44 am
Hi, Ryland. Thanks for the update. I’ll put a note in the story that there are now more designs!
June 14th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I just used this to create a couple quick banners for my sites. It looks like I could play around creating them for days. Thanks for the tips!
June 14th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Hi, Green Authors. I just saw the seal you made for your site. It has just the right touch of “officialness” for your topic — and it’s green! Nice.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Thanks, I need to create on thats 125×125 for blogs but the text gets too small.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Nice tools. Thanks for sharing with us.