About balloonmessages

Ordering a personalised balloon involves one surprisingly hard step: a text box, a character limit, and about four minutes before the shop closes. Every "100 birthday balloon messages" list on the internet is happy to give you a hundred sentences. None of them tells you that the eleventh one is fifty-one characters long and will not fit on the balloon you are buying.

That is the whole reason this site exists. Every message here shows its character count and the smallest balloon it fits on, so you can pick one and paste it into the order form without doing arithmetic on your phone in a car park. Press "see it" on any message and it will draw itself on each balloon type, wrapped the way a vinyl shop would set it, with the balloon's size and print area marked on the drawing — including, when it does not fit, the part that runs off the edge. You can edit the text there too, which is the point: the single most common change anyone makes to a suggestion is adding a name, and that is exactly the change most likely to push it past a limit.

Where the messages come from

They are written for this site. There is no scraped list underneath it and no generator producing variations on a template — six hundred or so lines, written by a person, tagged by occasion, by who the balloon is for, and by how the message is meant to land.

That has a visible consequence: some combinations you might expect do not have a page. There is no "retirement balloon for your daughter" page, because there are not four genuinely different things to write on one. Rather than generate a page that repeats the general retirement messages under a new heading, the site does not make that page at all. If you were looking for it, the general page for that occasion is the right one.

What the character counts mean

Personalised balloons are printed, or cut in vinyl and applied by hand, onto a curved surface. The usable print area is smaller than the balloon looks, and it varies between vendors — a 20" bubble from one shop takes noticeably more text than the same size from another.

The limits on the sizes page are the conservative end of what personalisation shops quote. A message under the limit will be fine basically anywhere. A message over it is a reason to ask the shop before you order, not a flat no.

Counts include spaces and punctuation, because vinyl does too.

Who made it

Built by Donny West. If a message here reads wrong, or you have one worth adding, say so.