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For a while it seemed like buttons only came in two options: the yellow smiley face and cannabis leaves.

But buttons got a high-design upgrade in 2005, when the Toronto urban-issues magazine Spacing introduced buttons for every subway stop in the city (complete with the corresponding tile motif).

Suddenly, buttons were objets d'art. (And in a nod to Toronto's 175th anniversary this year, Spacing has just released a new series featuring the coats of arms of local towns and municipalities.)

Now York University has jumped on the bandwagon as part of its 50th anniversary commemoration efforts, called U50. It has introduced a set of eight colourful buttons based on banners created for the institution's original colleges - and at a recession-friendly price of 34 cents each.

Designed between 1963 and 1975, these were no ordinary banners. At the time, York enlisted some of Canada's leading abstract artists, including Guido Molinari and Painters 11 members Harold Town and Frank Bush.

Each banner is open to interpretation. Vanier College's, by Bush, is a clean study in blue, green and magenta, while the McLaughlin College button (created by then-student Don Cole in 1968/69) either resembles a coffee bean or a basketball court. Reducing the original banners to button size was done by an in-house team at York.

"We knew that the banners existed, but a lot of people didn't know about them," says Shelley Town, product consultant for the U50 project and daughter of Harold. (Representing Founders College, his is the 12-pronged design with a blue and white disk at the centre.) "The university was committed to the arts when it was still a new thing in the sixties."

Town, who formerly owned the Danforth Avenue shop Butterfield 8, says the likeness to the Spacing buttons was intentional. "We sold them in the store and they attracted people who had never come in before. You can put them on a bulletin board; you don't have to wear them."

For non-alums, there is nothing to suggest that the buttons are affiliated with the university. They would not, in other words, look out of place at any art gallery store.

The buttons are part of a collection of other commemorative tchtockes - from mugs to metal key chains - in the university's palette of red, white and silver and bearing the stylized U50 logo. Cufflinks ($29.99), magnets ($11.99) and snow globes ($14.99) featuring black and white archival images are among the standouts.

As Town says, "I think [York] was looking to the past but also to presenting the [history] in a way that was current and accessible to the graduates of tomorrow."

The U50 collection is available online at http://www.yorku50.ca/shop and in specially curated sections of the York Bookstore on both the Keele and Glendon campuses.