Silent Storms

In the pre­vi­ous part, I’ve explained the basics of good look­ing link but­tons. I will now con­tinue with some exam­ples of things you could do to make your link but­tons stand out more, and end with some fast meth­ods of mak­ing link buttons.

Mak­ing fancy link but­tons
To make your link but­tons stand out more, there’s plenty of things you can do: text effects, using tex­tures, brushes, etc. Below I’m only giv­ing some exam­ples of text effects, tex­tures and dif­fer­ent bor­ders, but there’s plenty more to try, so just play around with your program’s fea­tures and see what works and what doesn’t.

Text effects: Motion Blur
Dupli­cate your text layer, ras­ter­ize the low­est text layer, and add a motion blur (Fil­ter > Blur > Motion Blur).

Text effects: Gra­di­ent
Right-click the text layer, select Blend­ing Options and select Gra­di­ent Over­lay. I per­son­ally pre­fer using a gra­di­ent from colour to white, with the colour being just a lit­tle lighter than the out­line colour of the text.

Text effects: Extra text
This is not really a text effect, but adding extra text in a fancy font can look quite nice (make sure the extra text is short and read­able). Other extra things you could add could be hearts, or depend­ing on your sub­ject, music notes and other pixel sym­bols. A heart and a music note are included in Wendy’s pixel font, but it’s also really easy to just draw them your­self.

Tex­tures
This really depends on the image and the tex­ture. Not all tex­tures go well on all images, so again, this is just another “try and see what works well” thing.

Bor­ders
There’s a mil­lion pos­si­ble bor­ders you could make, below are the most pop­u­lar (apart from the basic border).

Adding a white inner bor­der. This is sim­i­lar to the basic bor­der explained ear­lier, just inside the already exist­ing bor­der.

Mak­ing a dot­ted bor­der. You can make a dot­ted bor­der from the basic bor­der by either adding pixel by pixel to make it dot­ted, or by using the Pen­cil tool of 1px and 100% hard­ness, and then in the Brushes set­tings, select­ing Brush Tip Shape and set­ting the Spac­ing to 200%. Then draw the bor­der by click­ing in the cor­ner of the image, hold shift and click in the oppo­site cor­ner, and so on until you’ve done all 4 sides.

Some fast meth­ods to make link but­tons
Once you know the basics, you can develop your own method of mak­ing link but­tons and see what works eas­i­est and fastest for you. Below I’ve included some meth­ods I and oth­ers are using to make link buttons.

Short­cuts
Once you learn the short­cuts of the tools you use often, things can get really quick. In Pho­to­shop, you can set your own short­cuts by going to Edit > Key­board Shortcuts.

Using tem­plates
Instead of resiz­ing and crop­ping, use pre-made trans­par­ent files for each link but­ton size that you want to make, with the bor­der and the text already done (or a basic text that you only have to change into your subject’s name). Edit the image to your lik­ing (resize, sharpen, edit brightness/contrast, add tex­tures, etc) then copy it to the tem­plates and change the colour of the bor­ders and text outline.

The end
This was my tuto­r­ial about mak­ing link but­tons. I hope you found it help­ful. I started with a bad exam­ple, explained what’s wrong with it, then told you the very basics of mak­ing nice look­ing link but­tons, gave a few exam­ples of fancy things you could add to your link but­tons to make them stand out more, and ended with some fast meth­ods to make link buttons.

If there’s any­thing unclear or you’re miss­ing some­thing in this tuto­r­ial, please feel free to com­ment with any ques­tions or suggestions.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 11:46 and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.