88x31, cool retro buttons

Yesterday I was browsing multiple blogs from iii.social and came across https://jotalea.com.ar/. What caught my attention was a tab called 88x31, which sounded like a rather strange name. After opening it, I was delighted to find custom retro buttons that are 88x31 pixels.

These buttons were popular in the 1990s, before and during my early childhood, and were later discontinued, so I didn’t get to see them until now. They were used by many websites hosted on GeoCities as badges, buttons, or to promote communities. The buttons were intentionally small, since bandwidth was more scarce in that era of the internet, and they fit well in tables, which were widely used to build websites at the time.

The use of 88x31 declined between 2000 and 2010 with the widespread adoption of CSS. With CSS, buttons and images no longer needed to be pixel-perfect — instead, they could adapt to the viewport and support things considered much cooler at the time, like hover animations. People who wanted badges could also use larger ones, without being limited to 88x31 pixels. Nowadays, they are used by some people (like https://jotalea.com.ar/ as mentioned before) to decorate their blogs.

Here are a few examples of 88x31 that I have found:

Something that makes these even better is that they are GIFs — they can show movement, see it for yourself:

If you want to find more, here are two great collections:

• The 88x31 GIF Collection by DABAMOS — over 4500 classic buttons from the 1990s and 2000s.
• THE 88×31 ARCHIVE — over 31,000 unique buttons scraped from the GeoCities archives before it shut down in 2009.

If you want to embed them into your website, use the following tag. Note that the height and width are fixed to avoid layout issues:

<img src="giffilename" alt="description" height="31" width="88">