November 5, 2007

Leopard-Style buttons with Veerle

If you aren't already familiar with Veerle's Blog, you should check it out. Veerle lives in Belgium and has a fantastic blog that covers Illustrator among other applications. Veerle, a strong supporter of CSS, is also a talented designer (far more talented than yours truly I should add).

Recently, Veerle posted a step-by-step tutorial on how to create those cool-looking buttons that Apple is now using in Leopard and on their website. To take Veerle's excellent concept one step further, I've recorded a podcast which shows how to create those same buttons using Illustrator's Graphic Styles and the Convert to Shape effect.

You'll find my podcast over at Terry White's most excellent Adobe Creative Suite Podcast site. Enjoy!

7 comments:

David Harper said...

Thanks Mordy, that is a fun tutorial. Especially good to learn something like the drop shadow > multiply...

I'd love more tips on creating fun and different TEXT effects. I use text effects from your book (e.g., 3D + warp), if you've got more of these up your sleeve, do share!

Anonymous said...

Awesome tutorial... thanks Mordy!

nanimoshiranai said...

Great tutorial! Thank you!
I created now a style with rounded rectangular shape, another one with (only) rectangular form.
Question that arises afterwards: can I create in the same manner a style that has on the left hand corners rounded, but on the right hand side normal rectangular corners? (And vice versa, in order to quickly build a menu bar as on the apple.com website...)
Thank you Mordy!

OGB said...

She seems very good designer, I will stick with their new posts. Thanks
Games Business

Anonymous said...

Great tutorial on buttons and graphic style for text. I would like to use your basic technique of Add New Fill to type in the appearance palette and then applying the Effect > Convert to Shape > Rounded Rectangle as a graphic style for highlighting text more generally. My problem is that the text is not vertically centered in the rectangle, rather it always appears a little high in the rectangle. Is there a way to truly center the text vertically with your technique?

I know centering can be done with area type and Area Type Options, but then I apparently lose the advantage of a graphic style that can be quickly applied and that adjusts itself automatically to the type.

Related matter: Is there a way to easily add a stroke to the rounded rectangle effect or must I stack two slightly different sized filled rectangles on top of each other?

Unknown said...

Hi Mordy,
thanks for the great tutorial! I need to "place" this button into InDesign so I can successfully include it in a cross-media export to Dreamweaver. Any suggestions? When I have attempted it, the button loses it "elasticity". Can you help?

Anonymous said...

Great tutorial. I like being able to modify the text.

Was wondering how to add a border around the RoundRect fill. I can't see to get it. It always adds the stroke to the type.