Step 1 – Make or Find a Button

For this tutorial I’ll be using my green glossy buttons from a previous freebie post. Feel free to download the source PSD and follow along, or just make your own button style.

Step 2 – Prepare the Button

Before we really get started, it’s important to know what size we want to make our button. For this example I’ll create a button that is quite large, I’m thinking around 300px by 60px in size. So go ahead and crate a new Photoshop document with the dimensions you want.

After you’ve created the document, import my button (or yours) and scale it up so that it fills almost the entire document. If you have a little extra space on the sides it’s not the end of the world, just make sure that your button is perfectly centred on the canvas. To centre somthing perfectly you just need to:

1. With your button folder/layer selected, use the marquee tool (m-key)  to select the entire canvas (apple-a)
2. Without deselecting anything, choose the Move tool (v-key) and use the alignment tools in the top panel to centre your button vertically and horizontally.

A Perfectly Centred Button

Step 3 – Create a Rollover State

Next up we need to create a rollover state. Basically, we need to double our canvas size (vertically) and duplicate our button. From the top menu select Image > Canvas Size… and double the height of your canvas (120px if you’re following my example). Once your canvas size is doubled, divide it vertically with a horizontal guide.

Now you need to duplicate your button and centre it perfectly in the top section. The top button will be what our button looks like when you rollover, for now it looks the same as the bottom.

Next we add a rollover effect. If you’re using my buttons, you can open up the layer styles of the top button and slide the inner glow up to 75%. This will give our button a subtle glow effect when we hover over it.

With your button and rollover effect ready to go, you can now “save for web.” One important thing to consider here is what your background will be like. For my example I’ve made the background transparent and saved my buttons in PNG format. This means my buttons are not supported in IE6, but you could just as easily choose a background color and ditch the transparency, making your buttons IE6 friendly.

Step 4 – CSS Sprites and Some Basic HTML

Now comes the fun part, creating the button. First, we’ll start with some markup, a simple and humble link:

 <a href="#" class="button">My Glossy Button</a> 

I’ve given this link a class so that I can target it easier, but other than that it’s just a plain old link. Moving on let’s do some CSS magic. The basic idea is that we hide the link text using the text-indent property and give the link a background-image that only shows the non-rollover state. On hover we simply shift the background to show hover state, avoiding any loading time that is typical of CSS/Javascript image swaps.

a.button {
display: block;
width: 300px;
height: 60px;
text-indent: -999em;
background: url(css-glossy-rollover.png) 0px -60px no-repeat;
}

a.button:hover {
background-position: 0px 0px;
}

If you’ve done everything right the button should look something like this:

My Glossy Button

Click here or on the image to download the source PSD file.

Feel free to use these buttons in any commercial or personal project. Click here or on the image below to download the source PSD of these blue vector buttons.