(NOTE: I came up with this tutorial myself. If you’re going to cite it, please LINK BACK TO ME and give me credit! It took me a long time to write this, ya know!)
Meh. So after checking out my delightful blinkie buttons, some of you may ask, “Gosh- how can I make cool blinkie buttons for my own blog without spending a dime on expensive software?” “How can I make a supercoolio picture montage like this one without complex software I need months to learn?” Well fret no more, my friends. I wrote out a step-by-step tutorial on the cheap bastard’s guide to making blinkie buttons.
Basically you need 3 programs. Most of you should have the first one.
1.) MS Paint to make the individual frames for the blinkie.
2.) Irfanview to convert the bmp files from MS Paint into GIFs. Freeware.
3.) UnFREEz. Freeware. This is what actually animates the gifs and makes the blinkie.
To make a blinkie, you can do either I or II:
I. Using Online Blinkie Makers
a.) Go to any blinkie maker site and put the blinkie together
yourself. There’s tons of sites out there, but I happen to like DW Blinkie Maker and Star-Girl. You put together the blinkie by dragging the pieces together. Then print screen and paste onto MS Paint.
b.) Cut out your blinkie template from the screeen cap you saved and paste it onto a blank MS Paint page. Save your main blinkie template as BMP.
c.) Open up the same file in Irfanview and save the file as a GIF. (You have to save the file as a GIF in Irfanview because I’ve found that saving the file as a GIF in MS Paint leads to a loss in color quality.) Note: a little window will pop up next to the “Save picture as” window. Make sure the settings are that the Quality is at 100% (best quality), the last 3 boxes in the JPG section are checked off, and that both boxes in the GIF section are checked off.
d.) Re-open the file in MS Paint.
Now the fun begins.
e.) Basically, think of blinkies in the sense of old fashioned animation. You have to create separate images accordingly to how you want the blinkie to work. Example: If you want to make a blinkie using blocks that form your name, you start off with your original, unmodified blinkie template. Call it “Toni” or whatever. Then color in just the “T” with whatever color you’d like the “blink” part to be- usually a light color like neon green, white, or bright pink is best. Save that as “Toni1″. Re-open “Toni” and then color in the “O”, then save that under “Toni2″. Get the picture? Of course, you can color each letter in any order you want, depending on how you want them to flash. If you have a background or flowers or hearts or whatever, you can color them too so that they blink. In the end, to wrap things up, I usually color in all the letters so that they blink in unison. But whatever floats your boat.
f.) When you’re done making the little blinkie parts, open up UnFREEz. Drag each file into the box according to whatever order you want the blink to occur. Now do you see why I named each file by number? Easier to keep track of them that way. When you’re done with that, set how many seconds you want it to blink. I find that 10-15 seconds is a decent speed for small blinkie buttons, but making larger montage pictures (like the Kaonashi one I made) should be a lot slower- about 40 seconds. Anything faster than this could induce seizures or at the least, your eyes will hurt.
g.) Voila! You’re done.
II. Making your own blinkies from scratch.
a.) Ok, this is actually a lot easier IMO since you don’t need to color individual letters. It’s more of just combining pictures with different colors. Open up MS Paint.
b.) Go on Image -> Attributes and set width to 88px and height to 31 px- your standard button size. But again, whatever floats your boat.
c.) Make the button. Example, I made a black Kaonashi button. Save in MS Paint as BMP, then reopen in Irfanview and save as GIF. (Note: While in Irfanview, you can take the opportunity to add text to your button. Drag an outline with your mouse to where you want the text to be. Click on Images -> Insert Text Into Selection. A window will pop up that will allow you to customize your text.)
d.) Make another button in MS paint. I made a white Kaonashi button. Repeat saving process.
e.) Open up UnFREEz and pop both buttons in, choose blinkie speed, then animate. Voila! A blinkie!
f.) Of course you can make your animated button blink more colors by making more buttons to put together.
THINGS OF NOTE:
1.) Since buttons are tiny, I recommend magnifying them when you work in MS Paint, especially when you’re coloring letters in and such.
2. ) You can also animate banners by doing the same process I outlined in II.
3.) Like I said earlier, you can also make photo montages by putting a bunch of pictures together and animating them. I think though, that the physical size of the photos (width and length) you want to use have to all be exactly the same. I haven’t tested out different sizes but it’s safe to say that it’s best if they were all physically the same size.
4.) On the same note, the file size (kb) of your actual animated photo is dependent upon the size of each individual photo. Meaning that the larger each photo, the less you can put inside UnFREEZ. I was able to put 19 different button images in UnFREEz, but when I made a photo montage for my sister I was able to only put in 6 at a time, since her pics were larger than the buttons.
See! Now you too can make cute little blinkie buttons and banners without fancy software like Paintshop Pro. No, you can’t make dissolves or little reindeer dance through your banner but hey- these software are FREE, remember? Now go out there and make some buttons, ya cheapskates! Enjoy!
