Shields 
An image server for legible & concise information.
Installation Instructions: INSTALL.md.
Contributions: CONTRIBUTING.md.
Specification: SPECIFICATION.md.
License: LICENSE.md.
Problem
Many GitHub repos sport badges for things like:
- Travis CI build status:
- Gemnasium dependency checks:
- RubyGems released gem version:
As you can see from the zoomed 400% versions of these badges above, nobody is (really) using the same badge file and at normal size, they're hardly legible. Worst of all, they're completely inconsistent. The information provided isn't of the same kind on each badge. The context is blurry, which doesn't make for a straightforward understanding of how these badges are relevant to the project they're attached to and what information they provide.
Solution
As you can see below, without increasing the footprint of these badges, I've tried to increase legibility and coherence, removing useless text to decrease the horizontal length in the (likely) scenario that more of these badge thingies crop up on READMEs all across the land.
This badge design corresponds to an old and now deprecated version which has since been replaced by beautiful and scalable SVG versions that can be found on shields.io.
Examples
What kind of meta data can you convey using badges?
- test build status:
build | failing - code coverage percentage:
coverage | 80% - stable release version:
version | 1.2.3 - package manager release:
gem | 1.2.3 - status of third-party dependencies:
dependencies | out-of-date - static code analysis GPA:
code climate | 3.8 - semver version observance:
semver | 2.0.0 - amount of gratipay donations per week:
tips | $2/week
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