Project 5
Create custom navigation buttons
I kept this project relatively simple, though I did experiment with creating a button with more rounded corners by using the eliptical tool and holding down the shift key to keep a circle. I then switched to the 1 pixel wide marquee tool to try to expand the circle in two directions to create a rectangular shape that still had the radius of the initial circle on each corner. That worked fine, but I did not like the appearance when I applied effects like shadows, the outer glow, and especially the beveled edge. So, I reverted back to using a simple rectangle.
I found out I had made one blunder because of the layer with the outer glow effect. This resulted in a white border that completely defeated the idea of the glow, showing up very well on my black background Web page, thank you very much. ;-) The solution I thought of was to simply and quickly create another layer, fill it with black, and place it at the bottom of the "stack". I might have missed a transparency setting, but this worked okay.
I used three images to create different states of the button like this:
The "up" state button (no, it doesn't come from New York state)
Rollover effect
Current page highlighting/indicating
I did not add text directly to the buttons in the nav bar because it is easier to change the button text using HTML when I would change the URL's. I don't think I would create a separate button (for example, I would need to save and upload 15 separate images if I had five buttons) with text for each state. But, I know the rubric asks me to do that, so I have created and included these below. Admittedly, the options for fancier text is one thing that does make this an attractive possibility, and I may yet do this for at least this portfolio section of this site.
