I have a control panel in a game I am working on and I am attempting to put words on the buttons. Rather than using text inside unity, Tiff drew up some words into .png files and I set them as the albedo (alpha is transparency) to a material and applied it to some of the buttons. But I cannot seem to get the albedo color to work. The entire button is transparent besides the text. 
Any advice would be really appreciated!
Looks like you're adding it to a 3d object which means by default it's going to tile and try to display the texture on all faces of the mesh, even if they're quite small on the sides. Select the texture in the project and set the Wrap Mode to Clamp. That will only display the texture once based off its size. You could also just use it as a sprite itself (change the texture type from texture to Sprite 2D and UI)and place it slightly above the surface of the mesh, this will give you the best control over how it looks and you can also apply another material to the actual mesh.