Subtraction.com

Feeding the Hand That Fed Me

It took me a little while to get this all cleaned up and ready for release, but I’m finally making the expanded RSS buttons that we’ve started to use at NYTimes.com available to everyone. You can grab the PNG file here (right- or control-click on the image at the start of this post to save it to your computer) and start using it right away, or you can download the artwork as an Adobe Photoshop file and start customizing the label to suit your particular needs.

Whatever Label Suits You

Below: Anatomy of an icon. The feed icon button as Photoshop layers.

Why would you want to do that? Well, I’m glad you asked. The template, as provided, reads “FEED,” but you may be in an organization that prefers “RSS” or some other appellation. Setting aside the philosophical argument about whether that’s a good idea or not, this file preserves the text as an editable layer, so you can change it to read anything you’d like.

Font-tastically Flexible

The version I’m showing here uses the typeface Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed for its label, so you’ll need to have that installed on your computer if you want exactly the same look. Mindful of the fact that not everyone is lucky enough to own a copy of Helvetica Neue, there’s an alternative layer included that uses the more widely available (if also more widely disliked) Arial typeface instead. It doesn’t look nearly as nice, but only a hair’s breadth-sized slice of the public at large will notice.

Fringe Elements

But wait, there’s more! The edges of the button are translucent, so that you can create buttons that are appropriately ‘fringed’ to match the background against which they’ll sit. For instance, if you’ll be displaying your buttons against a pink background, you can use this template to generate a new image with pixels of intermediate color at the edge, that will then blend in perfectly with the pink background. A designer’s nirvana.

As an added bonus, I’ve included an alpha channel that will crop out a clean silhouette, so that the resulting button can be used against any color background without editing the fringed pixels. Now how much would you pay? Well put away that wallet, because it’s free.

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