Sometimes you just need a quick decent graphic for a logo, page or menu - time is short, and you really can’t face battleing photoshop or fireworks for half an hour to make a button background. What do you do? Use one of the great free online generators now available!

We have listed six of the ones we find most useful below:

1: Web 2.0 badges
Really cool way to make superb quality web 2.0 style badges for your site in seconds - our example below took no time at all! Nice choice of badge styles, and various fonts to choose from as well, make this a winner!


2: Logo generator
There are quite a few logo generators online now, but we like this one for its simplicity and the decent logo it produces. A few different fonts to choose from, and you can also select background/font colour, where or if the reflection appears and whether or not to display one of a variety of amusing badges such as ‘beta’. See our example below:


3: Stripe generator
Tiled stripes can be a pretty cool background (or foreground) effect when used right. Trouble is they can be a bit of a pain to churn out in your usual graphics editor as you have to get them just so or they don’t tile properly. Luckily help is at hand, in the shape of stripe generator. A really nicely deigned site that lets you customise your stripe tile and then download it, or share with other users. Our hastily-produced example below:

4: Cool button maker
Real nice slick button maker, simply select text, background and optionally an icon, hit go and then download. Really simple, and the results are nice quality as per our example:

5: 80 x 15 button maker
We like those nice little 80 x 15 sidebar buttons, and this online generator is the original and best to knock them out quickly with. All done in seconds, perfect results every time. Plenty of variables to play about with, and you can even upload images to insert as backgrounds! Less is more, as per our example:


6: Loading gif generator
Handy tool for generating nice crisp ‘loading’ gifs - the sort of thing that lightbox uses while loading an image. Simply pick your choice of image from a good array, then background and foreground colour, hit generate and away you go. Takes seconds, and saves hours!
Example below:

And there you have it. Six very useful resources for producing nice looking images for your site fast!