Blinkies

1998

A demonstration of the blinkie aesthetic, the strobing animated badge form that LiveJournal, Xanga, and tween homepage culture turned into currency. Place: personal homepages · message-board signatures · Neopets userlookups (2000+) Figures: anonymous artists · pixel-art communities · the BLINKIE EXCHANGE sites The BLINKIE is a small animated GIF, canonical dimensions roughly 50x15 pixels (some at 88x31, the same size as a web button), bearing two or three words of looping color-shift text. I LOVE UNICORNS. VISIT MY SITE. BEST VIEWED IN NETSCAPE 4. PROUD ARIES. OBSESSED WITH BACKSTREET BOYS. The text colors cycle through three or four palettes per second. The background is often a tiled glitter pattern or a static gradient. By 1999 there are blinkie EXCHANGE sites whose entire purpose is to host thousands of blinkies categorized by topic, free for any visitor to right-click and embed on their own page. The exchange model anticipates by a decade the reaction-GIF directories of the 2010s. The format is tiny, the bandwidth cost is negligible, the social function is enormous.