Making Buttons 

There are many styles of buttons you can make. From text buttons to buttons with graphics. I will show you a few ways and you should be able to take it from there!

1. Open a new transparent image mine is   200 x 175. 

2. Flood fill with your back ground color.

3. Create a new Raster layer & choose your font and colors. Use either Blade Pro or Inner Bevel and a drop shadow.

You can make just a text button like this:

You can add your graphic in several ways like this:

or this:
 

In the first one I resized my image to about 30 and added a drop shadow. For the second one I sized it a little larger and dragged the layer below my text and reduced the opacity to 65. 

When you are done, merge all your layers and crop any extraneous background. Save with GIF Optimizer as before.

Using Dings 

You can also use a dingbat font for a button.

 For this button I: 

1. opened a new image
2. flood filled with my background color
3. added dingbat on a new layer
3. used Blade Pro preset
4. added a drop shadow
5. created a new layer
6. added my text
7. added a drop shadow
8. merged all
9. saved using GIF Optimizer

Here is an alternate that is pretty as well:

After typing in your text or dingbat font, while still selected, but before running it through Blade Pro or Inner Bevel, use your tube tool & click randomly over your graphic. Then add BP or Inner Bevel. 

There you have it, the basics of button making.

Well, we have made backgrounds, a title, a divider and some buttons. Put them all together and you have yourself a web set! Pretty easy huh?

© 3 Angelz 2004