A badge has been forged. All the cool kids have been bringing back web badges, so as a mindless trend follower it was only a matter of time before I had to jump on the bandwagon and make my own. 88x31 is the size I like, and I wanted to make it truly 88 pixels wide by 31 pixels high rather than just scale down from a larger image. I know there are better pixel art tools out there but as a pixel art amateur and luddite I just went ahead and used the Rectangle tool in Figma, since that is where I assembled my mood board anyway. I first found a pixel font, Jacquard 12, that I liked and made some legibility tweaks to. I decided to keep it simple and make it monochromatic (slightly off-white and off-black) at first and maybe add some underline highlight or something very basic so I just started drawing at random.

At one point I drew some sort of underline that had the top half of an arrow which reminded me of the silhouette of Blade Beam, a Cloud Strife limit break from Final Fantasy VII and a perfectly normal and useful thing to take up valuable space in one’s brain.

So I thought why not add a little esoteric visual flourish for the heck of it and through some basic trial and error—again I am a pixel art newbie—I added some color and pixels where I saw fit and came up with this little guy:

A perfectly acceptable version 1 of a web badge in my estimation. Maybe I’ll attempt to add some animation to it at some point, but for now I’m going to stick with this until it gets boring. Speaking of boring, if you were curious, the humdrum origin story of “rbtnguyen” is that the email I was automatically assigned in college was btn9m@virginia.edu (go Hoos) and after college, I tried to keep the “btn” consistent and use “btnguyen,” but this was taken in Gmail and most places, so I just added an “r” to the front to make it “rbtnguyen” because “rbt” read vaguely as “robot” and it was an era where omitting vowels was cool. And fortunately there seem to be few Robert Nguyens who hate vowels throughout the Internet that I have to fight for this username so it’s typically up for grabs.

Anyways, I hope for and welcome a future of the web with a more personal touch, which is what I think web badges are all about. Even weird ones. Especially weird ones.