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Connor Leigh-Smith’s technology blog on web design; making money online; help, tips & hacking for iPods, iPhones & other gadgets… and much more!

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Tutorial – How to make a Userbar for signatures in Adobe Fireworks

[ No Comments ] Posted on 08.21.08 under Tutorials, comedy

I already made a tutorial on making user bars in Photoshop, but now here’s one for those people that prefer using Fireworks. Fireworks is a lot simpler than Photoshop, and I prefer it for doing easy tasks like this.

As I mentioned before, I’m using the CS3 (Creative Suite 3) on a Mac, so using the program might be a little different for you, but it will mostly be the same, and it’ll still be easy to follow.

Here we go…

Alright, first of all, open a new file in Fireworks (you should know how to do this )
Draw a rectangle using the Rectangle Tool, that measures 350 pixels by 20 pixels, like this:

Change it to whatever colour you want. I’ll use a gradient, so the rectangle fades from blue to green:

Here is the rectangle now

You need to apply an effect that puts faint diagonal lines across the rectangle. This makes it look more ‘glassy’, and is very easy to do.
Simply select the rectangle, and in the toolbar at the bottom, find the ‘Texture’ option, and change it to ‘Line-Diag 1′:

Now your rectangle will look a little bit more 3D:

To make it look glossy, you have to put a white oval with a gradient over the rectangle.
Make a circle the same size as the rectangle (350×20px), and fill it white (with no outline). Move it up, so that the bottom half of the oval covers the top half of the rectangle:

Now, change the gradient of the oval. Give it a linear gradient, and use the settings below:
Both ends need to be white, but one end is just more transparent than the other.

The part shown in red needs to have to Opacity changed to 10.

By now, your userbar should look something like this:

Using the Text tool, you can put some text into the user bar, and you can also add a small image if you like. It also looks better with an outline, which is added by making another rectangle the same size as the original, with no fill and a black outline.

Thanks for reading, and if you need any help, feel free to leave a comment

Jake and Amir

[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 08.14.08 under comedy

I’ve been watching the Collegehumor podcast videos for quite a while now, and I just found a website by Jake and Amir, from CollegeHumor, of their own hilarious videos.

Here are a couple of their (IMO) best videos from their site, enjoy!: