Sleek buttons with GIMP

In this tutorial I will show you how to create buttons in GIMP such as the one below.

Inspiration

This style of button design comes from ampparit.com, a Finnish news aggregation site. I use that site daily and am always impressed with their sleek site design. Quite minimalistic, except for some gradients and shadows. I decided to take one of their buttons apart to see how easy it would be to create a similar one in GIMP. Below you can see the target button design I attempted to copy.

Perhaps the original looks a bit better than my attempt. The grey background works better, also their choice to start the inner gradient at a darker level creates nicer contrast. Perhaps it's just a compression artifact, but the chunky appearance of their gradient also looks quite nice.

Examining the button you can observe a few things.

• The button has rounded edges.
• Gradient in the edges goes from light to dark.
• Gradient inside the button goes from dark to light.
• Text inside the button casts a shadow.
• The button itself casts a slight shadow.

Making the basic outline

Start off with a new image that has a white background, say 400x200 pixels in size. Change to 200% zoom and pan to the center of the image. Create a new transparent layer (CTRL-L to view layers, select icon that looks like a sheet of paper on the lower left) and select it. We will draw on this layer rather than the white background to later add a shadow to the button. Select a rectangular area which will become the outline of the button. In the "select" menu you can find the very handy "rounded rectangle" tool. Set radius to 30% or so and click OK.

Next we will need to pick two colors which will become the start and end colors of our gradients. The difference between the colors does not have to be huge, in fact effects often look better when they are not too dramatic. Any colors are probably fine, but if you have trouble deciding, try #45698d for foreground and #1a548e for background color. Press L to use the gradient tool. In options select gradient to be FG to BG. Now with this tool you can fill your selection with a nice gradient by dragging from top to bottom (this will eventually become the border).

To create the inner part we will shrink the selection a bit. From the "select" menu click on "shrink". Shrink the selection just a bit, for example 3 pixels. Now re-select the gradient tool and this time drag from bottom to top. For a nicer contrast, you could make your background color a bit darker before doing this. The basic outline of the button is now finished!

Adding shadows and text

Getting a shadow for the button is a matter of making a copy of the button layer, blackening that layer, then placing a blurred version of it behind the button. So go to layers (CTRL-L), select the button layer (should already be selected) and press the duplication icon. Now from the "layer" menu, select "colors > brightness-contrast". Set brightness to lower possible amount and contrast to maximum. Now you should have a totally black version of the button. Go to "filters > blur > gaussian blur". Select some value you like, say 32 pixels. In the list of layers drag the black button layer under the layer containing the actual button and now you have a nice shadow. Play with opacity if you would like the shadow effect to be a little less obvious. You could also move the shadow slightly to change the position of the light source.

All that is left now is adding some shadowed text. To keep things organized add a new transparent layer. Press T to use the text tool, then in the tool options select some cool font (how about "Vrinda"?), some interesting color and write something on the button (I chose 59px sized Arial Black this time, with color #eceab4). In the layers make a duplicate of this text. In the text tool options select the color of this duplicate text to be black. Before blurring this black text, you will have to do "layer > layer to image size" or else the blur will go over the layer boundaries. You can now do "repeat gaussian blur" in the filters menu. Again move the blurred black text behind the actual text.

Conclusion

As you can see creating buttons like these is actually very easy. The rounded rectangle tool combined with the usage of gradients, blur and layers often comes handy. Anything looks good with a bit of shadow ;)