Please share your 88x31 badge making tips!

[Melooon]

Im gonna be working a wiki page about making 88x31 badges sooooon! If anyone would like to share tips, or write your own mini guides that would be helpful!
What program do you use; how do you plan your design, how long do you spend on it; what steps do you take when making your badge; or did someone make your badge for you, and if so, how did you find them and ask them?

 

[sig]

I made & edited the badge for my personal site in Aseprite, a program used for pixel art which is easy to work with since the resolution is only 88 x 31. I was able to pretty seamlessly scale down my Big Logo to the required size for the badge, and using the animation tool I just moved the logo down a pixel frame by frame until I got this loop:




I also made a static version in case people want to link to me but prefer a static image for whatever reason, so I recommend considering that as well!

[LittleGr33nIMP]

EDIT: Added a screenshot of the storyboard.

I used aseprite for mine. An older version when it was still GNU. (I think that's the right one?)

Preparing:

I started by making a very simple storyboard of what I wanted in paint tool sai, I already had an idea so it was an easy and quick process. Used only a single colour, and 1-3 layers. Those layers were for the storyboard itself, lighting, and notes of the direction. (animation, movement, fade to black etc.)



Working on the button/badge itself:

Started with making the background (easiest part), then I picked out colours for the imp. I colour-picked from pokemon black and white sprites since I liked how they looked.

I finally start animating the imp itself.

Something that helped was understanding timing and easing for animation, making the simple action of the imp moving up more interesting by using less frames on certain actions. The hardest part with animating the imp was the blink, I still think I could've pulled it off better. But to be fair it was my first time.

What actually took the longest when working on the button was actually the fade to black loop! It was a super tedious process and idk if there was any way to make it faster. What I did was slowly changing the opacity of a layer of black each frame. It took forever!

TLDR: Check if there's a better way to do a fade to black than whatever the hell I did.

I think I took around 28 days or less on it. But I don't remember that well and this is just based off the timestamps of what I shared on discord.
For the sake of flexing (jk) the final animation has 79 frames of animation. I also plan on making a non-moving button but that isn't a main priority right now.

Here's the button for anyone's curious!