How to Create a Slick and Clean Button in Photoshop

Thanks for the tutorial – I always struggle with getting my text to look good, your drop shadow on it looks sweet: crisp and clean.

simple and effective tutorial! Thanks for sharing.

This was a good tutorial. Campaign Monitor uses Gotham as the main typeface on buttons, navigation etc. Gotham isn’t cheap, but it’s a nice touch of professionalism for buttons.

http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_overview.php?productLineID=100008

Fantastic touch making use of sprites, thanks!

Great tutorial — looking forward to seeing more on Six Revisions.

@Gabe: Thanks, I like experimenting with Blending Modes in the Layer Styles to create clean, simple text effects. The one on the leading image was by accident (inner glow set at weird settings), but it turned out great.

@Ben: Cool beans, thanks for identifying the actual font. I used Arial simply because I know everyone’s going to have it so that if they really did want to follow the process step-by-step, they wouldn’t be stuck. I’d use my favorite font, Rockwell, if it wasn’t a tutorial. The dropshadow used in this tutorial would be killer with that font.

I would keep the shape layers and just change the fill to 0% in case you ever wanted to make them longer or shorter you still have the shapes which allow you to use the handles to resize without compromising the corner radius. Also, keeping the shape makes recoloring the lower shape easy as pie.

Nice tut nonetheless.

Step 11’s image should be 04-15_slick_clean_14.png

Nice tutorial thanks

Great tutorial, especially the outline:none for mozilla.

Very thorough tutorial, and simple, a great combination. Really cleared up some confusion for me over setting up CSS sprites, I hope to implement this into my personal design practices soon.

Nice tutorial! I’ll try it in Gimp, I guess this should work, too.

It never occured to me to use photo shop for buttons. I have some button maker I am using- it does not give me nearly as many options as you have shown.

It would have been a whole lot simpler to just use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer with a mask to change the color of the bottom button. No need to change the layer styles and you can easily change the hue afterwards.

Cool – learned something new here with Align Layers, and red arrows in tut allow me to home in immediately on action req’d. Rollovers still have power. Thanx.

Nice tutorial..

Great tutorial and very timely as I have gone through I don’t know how many button styles for a project lately. You may want to swap your p tag for the more semantic button tag instead.

Great tutorial thanks.

Noob question. Why in the tutorial did we not use the shape tool itself to build the buttons but instead choose to create another layer with a similar mask.

The buttons came out really nice and if I could follow the tutorial anyone can!

Thanks again

I don’t think i have ever seen a tutorial on creating cool buttons. I think it is something most designers need to improve a lot. Hopefully they will take this information on board and improve the badly looking buttons – they should be banned!

Look at those shiny beautiful buttons:)
Very well done. I want three of those for my site!

I used DaButtonFactory.com and they are good. Super quick, just not as smooth as these buttons…

Great tutorial! Thanks.

Removing outline: none; is a bad idea as people using keyboard navigation won’t know where their focus is. Just be aware that the outline only displays when the element has focus, which is how a user knows where they are in the DOM.

Also, if you centre the text, then why not centre the radial gradient? It looks a little bit off.

Another note on the Campaign Monitor website, /designer/ gives you a JS prompt, and if you say no, you’re locked into going elsewhere. A nice touch, but you shouldn’t restrict someone from browsing the website based on their profession, IMHO. I’m a UI developer by trade, not quite a designer, but I still wanted to browse the site nonetheless.

Can you post articles for gimp

@mishoo: Yeah, that would be a good option. I just always preferred working with layers – but you’re right, keeping the Shape object makes it more flexible to changes.

@William: Well, that’s great – I wasn’t intending to teach CSS sprite positioning here, but I guess seeing it in actual use helps explain the concept.

@Tatu: Great tip, my methods seem to be “destructive” methods where I don’t normally account for changes to the design later on. The Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer is a good call.

@Steve Robillard: I struggled as to what tag I wanted to use for this tutorial. I figured a link is semantic, you click on it and it takes you some place. The text “Click this button” will throw people off (those that use screen readers, for example) – but a meaningful title attribute and replacement of the text link will make it semantic and accessible. I have to admit that I rushed the HTML/CSS part on this one, again, because I wanted it to be a Photoshop tutorial and not an (X)HTML tutorial.

@Pali Madra: Good question, it’s just been my method, you could have used the shape layer instead.

@Will Morgan: There’s got to be a compromise right? Having the outline there sucks using the text-indent method for CSS image replacement because the gray outline would extend to the left of the browser.

@Sebastian: Fixed it, thanks for letting me know!

Great tutorial – nice standard for effective buttons

Cool tutorial. Pretty slick.

Nice tutorial. I don’t know about the CSS part because I am only a Graphic Artist. But the Photoshop part is nice :)

Any web designer should easily be able to make this. Anyone that knows photoshop should be able to make it.

Instead of ‘outline: none’, you can give it ‘overflow: hidden’ which will restrict the outline to the dimensions of your button.

Fireworks?

Good tutorial – like your others. I particularly like the simplicity of the CSS ‘moving’ of the image to get round the image preload problem (nothing more annoying than waiting for a hover image!)

Thank you.

Great tutorial – Thank you so much for the info. I’m new to Six Revisions and just love your site!

Wonderful tutorial…I tried it..It looks amazing..However, when I uploaded it on website, it displays Green as well as Blue button. Can you suggest why?

Hi,
just the most fantastic tutorial I have seen on rollover buttons! Too good for words.
Just a question: can you show generic css and html code in case of hundreds on buttons on lots of pages on a site?
I have trouble getting the right code to work for some fifteen pages with tens of different buttons.

Another question:
why do you use a .button and another .button a css-element?
What do you think of this styling:

#button {
display:block;
width:100%;
heigth:100%;
background: transparent;
url(campaign-monitor-button.png) no-repeat top left;
outline:none;}

#button span{
display:none;}

…and of course also the hover style.
The actual text link can be inside a span element, and the the link text can be hidden with css and the image displayed instead (so that search engines still see the text).

@Erik Arckens: For your first question, do you have an example link? It should work fine multiple times, except if you have another .button style rule. Second question: that code should work, but it’s basically the same as mine, except instead of a p > a, you use a > span. The reason I did it my way is because I don’t like having an a element outside of a p element. If you want more than one button in a page, you should really use a class instead of an ID (.button versus #code). By the way, the height property is spelled wrong, so you might have issues with that.

Would it be possible to create a button that includes instead of a href link a php function?

I need a “contact us” button, which activates this php function:

Would it be possible to create a button that includes instead of a href link a php function?

I need a “contact us” button, which activates this php function:(I did not include the because it does not display in the blog) ?=createMailto(‘[email protected]’)?

What a great tutorial. Many thanks for taking the time to do all that. My goodness, very thorough!

HEY!!! this one is good. thanks a lot for this posting.

Hey, great tutorial, thanks for sharing!!!
Really awesome!!

nice helpful button tutorial, thanks a lot..

thank yo so much, it is a great tutorial

Wow, your so proficient in photoshop. i love that.
well, am a newbie of webdesigning, am actually a programmer kaya lang, i nid to design. hehe, akin lahat..
Praise God sa lahat.

oh!my god this is my favorite website its improves my professional aspects i like this tutorials very much thank you so much for easy going tutorials

This tutorial is great – does anyone know how to make the button “drepress” when cicked? Is that something you can do with the html or css or do you have to design the “click” pannel? If the former, what would the code be?

Thanks for sharing this tutorial. Finally I could make my own rollover effect button, as I am only a beginner in photoshop. Thanks once again

Great Tutorial. Love the site. Now here is a question. What is the easiest way of coding this kind of button if there were say five buttons instead of one?

I also would appreciate an example of the code that would be necessary to display multiple buttons. ex. vertical menu bar with multiple links/button running down it.

Thank you very much! Just what i looked for.
(Sorry my bad english)

Thanks for this great tutorial I stumbled it. Just one question how can I make the button smaller?

nice, this is a very good tutorial for webdesign

Thanks for the tutorial, I am going to teach this to my High School students now that I am comfortable doing it.

very cool. great tutorial!

Excellent tutorial. Really learned a lot from this.

It seems like such a simple thing to do, but I can’t get the button to open a different webpage in a separate window. Can you help?

Thanks!!

Great tutorial. Very nice and easy techniques

Hi Jacob……Wonderful and simple tutorial!

TUTORIAL CORRECTION – Minor
—————————
One area of detail I’d like to point out since I ran into this issue. You need to deselect the “Use Global Light” when creating the shadows for the text and button. If you don’t the button inner shadow will shift. It can be subtle and not immediately noticed.

You actually see it in the tutorial. As soon as you added the text, your button inner shadow shifted to -60. You can easily see the shadow(highlight shine) at the bottom right of the button(instead of upper left) in your final demo and the tutorial.

Just wanted to bring that to your attention.

Great tutorial!

Hi Jacob, Nice tutorial, clean and effective result. Thanks!

In step 9 the tutorial references “left Color Stop” and “right Color Stop” what is this? how do I find it? there is no explanation.

Wow, this is another great tutorial. Web Designers often overlook how important making your buttons look nice is! Thanks for sharing.

really good tut mate , but you should sort your page css out as often people quit pages that dont look the part , good work

will

Cheers for this, very easy to follow.

Great stuff, one of those simple but much needed tutorials which can help everyone from noobs to experts.

I love photoshop for its simplicity yet power. I usually stay away from the more complex javascript or flash based menus and navigation system as I think they negatively impact SEO. Menus like this however are excellent for websites as they are simple yet creative and above all do not require complex javascript libraries.

Thanks for this nice tutorial dude, love it awesome. And now I know.

I’m having trouble creating a selection around the rounded rectangle shape that’s outlined in step 5. The text says to use Ctrl, +, Click while the pictures next to it instruct you to do Shift, +, Click but neither of these select the shape. What is the right key sequence?

wonderfull, it’s enough to I become pro designer during watch this tutorial :D
many mistake :”>

Great Tutorial, you cant build a website without knowing this, Thanks for sharing.

I studied the html tutorial and I really learned a lot. I think my next homepage will be a lot better than my first one.

Very detailed, helped raise my skill. Thanks!!

I followed along, very good article. I am confused on one part, was there ever a point to marge the layers in PS? When I save for web, I end up w/ the button still split apart.

Great demo – keep up the cool work, thanks

Hey, did you try a Cool Button Designer? I think it is a best web button creator – if you dont have a photoshop or dont know how to use it. I suggest you to try it, it has bunch of features, and creates a cool looking buttons. Just google for Cool Button Designer.

Chao.

hi…j@cob….it make my site luk more beautiful..thnx

very impress n easy too…thank u so much

Thanks for sharing. Nice work!!!

thanks too much ….too nice!!

Hi, Great tutorial. I’m just having trouble implementing it for more than one button. Because the way this button functions with the background image being specified on the css does this mean I have to repeat the css for each button that I have. The only way I could get more than 1 button to work was like this:

Is there a better way where there is not as much repeat of css.

Thanks in advance:)

Its so nice tutorial Its help to create menu……….
Thanks

I have the same question as Arlind (June 1st, 2010). How can I put more than one button on an existing page? I need four and would most likely align them in table cells. How would the code read?

Otherwise… a great tutorial!
Thanks!

thanks for sharing such a nice n informative post.

Yea I definitely need this because the buttons in aWeber just aren’t cutting it..

I really love this tutorial, great work…….and nice details

Thank you! I always wondered how to do this. Its a lot easier than creating 2 different states or files. Well done!

Thanks, very nice tutorial.

Thanks again!

I do love the campaign monitor design. It’s so clean and uncluttered, yet still colourful enough not to be boring.

How can i make the button change size depending on the size of the browser?

to make a rounded selection ctrl+ click on the shape thumbnail in the layer window not in any other place

I wonder why they dont make a full and direct tutorial instead of make me dizzy and all newbies !!

Oh jes!!! great work…….and nice details.. They are necessary!!! Thank you!!

I really love this tutorial, great work…….and nice details

GREAT tutorial. Gonna split test these buttons on some of my campaigns, I wonder how they’ll help conversion in comparison to other buttons I’m using.

Cheers

Probably the best tutorial of all time. I once said to one of my designers can you design me a call to action that looks like the campaign monitor button, you gives have nailed it. I really like the look and feel of this button and I will be using it on some of my websites. Thank you. This tutorial will also come in handy for explaining to designers exactly what I mean by campaign monitor button!

Nice tutorial.

Nice tutorial friend, jus worked it along and got the ditto :)

great tips dude.,now i can enhance my skills in photoshop.

thank you very much. Even dummy like me also able to create web 2.0 button with tutorial above. Thanks again.

Very helpful, mate. Gave me insights into Photoshop that I’ve not had before.

Great job.

非常给力！学习中~~

For those wondering, @hace’s comment above mine is translated by Google Translate as:

Is a force! Learning ~ ~

Hi Jacob, very simple to understand clean and effective – thanks

it works and it is not difficult at all! great!

Nice artical ..

Great tutorial looking forward to reading more…

Nice tutorial (and website) for making a good looking button. Thanks :-)

Fantastic

This tutorial and everything it encompasses is a gift!

Thank you – and thanks for providing the psd and html files.

ok-when I get to step 18, after I dulicate the layers and try to move them from the Layer pallet over to the bottom half of the document, I get an error message that says,”could not complete your request because source and destination documents are the same” CAN SOMEONE PLEEEEASE HELP ME WITH THIS! what am I doing wrong?

Nice tutorial, Definitely need decent buttons.

Thanks for sharing.

“6 With the selection still active, create a new layer (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + N). Name it Idle. With the new layer active, fill the selection by going to Edit > Fill (Shift + F5).”

^^^ Right click layer, ‘rasterize’. Same thing. :)

nice tutorial!:)
thanks.

I have the same question as Arlind (June 1st 2010)

I need to have 10 buttons on the same page. Do I need to define 10 CSS rules or is there an easier way?

Good job

Great tutorial – one of the best I’ve seen. Easy simple to follow. I created it in less than 20mins. Bookmarking this!

very good tutorial, decent buttons.

Thanks for sharing this

Thanks for this very useful tutorial.

@pegleg – I wanted to created several buttons on the same page, and the way I tackled it was to create a separate class for each different button background image ..
.button1 a {background:transparent url( xxxxx)etc;}
.button2 a {background:transparent url( xxxxx)etc;}

then change the html using two classes to
<a class="button1" href="#null">Click this button</a>
<a class="button2" href="#null">Click this button</a>

etc

great work i love it.

The Perfect Steps that I have never viewed before.
Superb methods to understand very quickly

I’ve tried to implement Strangeman’s approach using the following code:

<a href="#null" rel="nofollow">Home</a>
<a href="#null" rel="nofollow">Hours</a>

However, no images load. I only get get phantom outlines if I click where images should be. works, but I don’t want breaks between buttons. Any help?

Great tutorial. I don’t think I have come across such a detailed explanation on how to create nice looking buttons. Bookmarked for future reference, thanks.

Very good and informative article written on web 2.0 slick and clean button in photoshop, happy to learn it.

Great tutorial. Very stylish. You have taste, sir!

Hi.

I am also trying to create more buttons, to replace the menu at the top of my (basic) website. I have made different .png files with the different words (home, reviews, gigs etc)

The first button works

The second does not. I copied the css but changed button to buttonb (buttonbio.png)

 .buttonb{
	display:block;
	width:150px;
	height:50px;
	text-indent:-9999px;
}
.buttonb a {
	display:block;
	width:100%;
	height:100%;
	background:transparent url(buttonbio.png) no-repeat top left;
	outline:none;
}
.buttonb a:hover {
	background-position:0 -50px;

then

<a><a href="http://lamortsubite.co.uk/bio.php" rel="nofollow">Bio</a>

All I get is the word Bio. No button. Can you help perhaps? I am not an expert…

Thanks, also used this to create some nice smallish banners.

Hi Zarand, I think you forgot to add the class=”buttonb” to the link.
Should be like this:
<a href="http://lamortsubite.co.uk/bio.php" rel="nofollow">Bio</a>

Very wonderful tutorial…. thank you so much for posting this useful tutorial… Well done… :)

Hi!
Thanks you. Very simple and very nice!

working!! try it, it is easy when well explained :) thanks!

AGH! I wish I had read this a week ago BEFORE the 3 hours or so I spent trying to make a button like this. Great tut anyway, cheers.

explained very well

My question is where do you write the HTML and CSS code in what program dreamweaver or photoshop ? Cause it didn’t say where to edit the HTML and CSS after the photoshop creating the button