Tiny works of art

Ways in which these badges are better quality than most similar button badges:

• Design centred virtually perfectly within the circle of the badge - any that come out off-centre are ditched.
• Black laser ink on coloured paper (with design reversed out) gives solid black and solid vivid colours - touched up by hand if necessary.
• Artwork brushed off by a soft paintbrush before putting into the badge machine, to minimise dust specks which might show up against the black background. If visible dust does creep in, that's a "second", and won't be sold here. (The new plan is for those to go to Oxfam, because it seemed a bit un-green just to bin them.)

... versus poor imitations

Some possible attributes of badges not from here:

• Designs are poorly centred on the badges (because if you don't bother to take care over this, you can bosh off more badges in the same amount of time)
• Edges of design are pixillated due to using low-resolution artwork
• Printing is done by inkjet - black is less black and some colours are speckly

All the designs on this site are copyright to me, although not all the slogans are (see note on copyright).

In the summer of 2004, it was brought to my attention that there was a stall at Nottingham Pride (and, I think, at London Mardi Gras) selling poor copies of some of these badge designs. I don't just mean using the same slogans - I mean having obviously printed the badges directly from the artwork on this web site (hence low resolution). Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say, so I was kind of tickled by this as well as annoyed at the violation of copyright (which, besides being rather cheeky, is illegal).

After putting up a version of this page, I later received email from the manufacturers of the copies. They assure me that they copied the artwork from another site, which claimed that it was copyright-free. So they were under the illusion that they had the rights to use it. Unfortunately they couldn't locate the intermediary site any more, so I was unable to follow the trail in that direction. So if you do see a site claiming that these same logos are free of copyright, please let me know, and/or tell them that they are mistaken