Professional Navigation Bar
This tutorial with guide you through how to make a professional looking navigation bar for your site. This tutorials takes in to account that you have a reasonable knowledge of Photoshop:
1. |
Make a new document. For this tutorial I am using 800x40 with a resolution of 72 pixels/inch with Colour Mode set to RGB Colour 8 bit. |
2. |
Make a box that takes up most of the area, but leave around 5 pixels space at the bottom and fill with a gradient of #FFFFFF to #DDDDDD from top to bottom of the selection to make this: |
3. |
Now out of the 5 pixels you left select the middle 3 using the single line marquee tool or by using the rectangular marquee tool. |
4. |
Create a new layer and fill this with #006699 and set the opacity of this layer to 50% |
5. |
Now we have the background for our navigation bar. Select the vertical single line marquee tool and draw a line anywhere vertically down your nav bar. Create a new layer and fill it with #000000. Then delete everything on and below the blue bar to get this. |
6. |
Get the rectangular marquee tool and make a small selection at the top like this: |
7. |
Go to Select » Feather » Set to 10px then press OK. Press the Delete key around 10 times and set the layers opacity to 50%. |
8. |
Add all your text in for your links and duplicate the spacers to go in between the links |
9. |
Select the vertical single line marquee tool again and click on one of the spacers to select the whole line. |
10. |
Now click Layer 2 which is your blue bar and press Delete then move the bar 1 pixel to the left then delete then 2 pixels to the right then press delete. |
11. |
You now have a complete navigation bar. |