Let me introduce to you, one of the developers at RustyBrick, Jaimie Sirovich. I took him to the SES show two weeks ago, and he has been a huge fan of SEO topics. Like me, he believes in the whole build it from ground up approach. Jaimie wrote an article he named Graphical, SEO Friendly Buttons. The article is a spin off of Stewart Rosenberger's Dynamic Text Replacement article.
Here is a quote:
Frankly, I got bored of creating buttons like this every day at work; I'm a programmer not a designer after all, and the product of my frustration is a basic PHP class that generates simple buttons based on a template. The template consists of a left-image, a right-image, and a tile image for everything in between.
This is more of a "how-to" article, pretty technical, hope it helps some of you guys. Any comments, feel free to post them here.