How do I achieve this effect? I've been trying for days now!

[F4TAL]

Alright so I've been playing in photoshop trying to recreate this website template, http://area51gaming.com/ and I am having trouble figuring out how.
How do you make the navigation and header images have that effect? Also, how do you get that custom image for the navigation buttons?

Any help is much appreciated!!

[Timentia]

what effect do you mean lol

[okinan]

The buttons are rollovers. Theres two different images. The standard one, and a different image for when the mouse is over the button. All they did was add a little color to the rollover image.

If you mean the glowing effect on the header image, not sure.

[F4TAL]

Well I guess the one thing I'm really trying to figure out is the shapes, how do you make custom shapes in photoshop?
And are there other graphic design programs that could be used to make web layouts other than photoshop?

[okinan]

Illustrator comes to mind, but I havent used it before. Dreamweaver is what most people use to make a website I think. If you are talking about the polygon shape thing, that might just be a custom brush or even the polygon lasso tool.

[Pet]

Put dream weaver downand step away from it. It is a bad program for coding websites with.


You can use either photoshop, or illustrator, or flash, or my other raster/vector program. As for how they got those shapes, it looks like they used the rounded rectangle tool, cut off the bottom, then had a 45 degree cut in the top right corner.

Custom shapes. An be down with the pen tool, lasso tool, or freehand with a pencil/brush. I will advise against using using too many creative shapes, as odd lines/curves can look weird.

[Lewk]

Pentool. Blending styles. how I would of done it. Or cut away from rounded rectangle like pet said.

[F4TAL]

Okay cool, thanks for your advice everyone! Now, pen tool, can anyone direct me to some nice tutorials about that?

[shiv96]

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs31/f/20..._Ventarron.png

[twohigh]

good tut ^, and yeah i make my custom shapes with the pen tool. You'd be surprised how much you can do with it.