Aqua Button

I want my buttons to look like they do on a Mac!!! Then buy a Mac! Or, better still, try this handy little tutorial!

Creating Your Button

Open a new document 200x100. White canvas.

Select the Rectangle tool and draw a 150x50 rectangle. In the Object panel, set the roundness of the corners to 100.

Set the fill colour to your choice (I've used a blue colour for Mac "authenticity" - but it's up to you!) and apply Inner Glow (EFFECTS>SHADOW AND GLOW>INNER GLOW) and a "Ripple" gradient fill. Drag the control handles as below.

Clone the selection (EDIT>CLONE), then click MODIFY>ALTER PATH>INSET PATH. Inset the path of the new overlaid object by 5 pixels "inside".

Change the fill colour for this object to white, solid fill.

Click on the rectangle tool again and draw a rectangle on top of the new white object.

Apply a black-white linear fill to this rectangle.

Move and re-size the fill handles until the linear fill splits the new rectangle in half, with the black section at the top.

Change to the "Select Behind" tool and, whilst pressing Shift, select the hidden rounded rectangle.

Now click MODIFY>MASK>GROUP AS MASK. If you are keeping up this far, the previously hidden white rectangle should now show as a gradually fading "reflection" on top of your original object, just like this:

De-select the objects, then click to choose the rectangle tool.

Draw a 130x20 rectangle in the lower third of the button and fill it with a lighter version of your original fill choice. As before, set the roundness of this rectangle to 100 in the Object panel.

Apply Gaussian blur to this new object (EFFECT>BLUR>GAUSSIAN BLUR), with a setting of 5.

Now click MODIFY>ARRANGE>SEND BACKWARD.

You're almost there!

All it needs now is some text, preferably "floating" inside this liquid button. And it's as easy as this...

Click the text tool and select your font, font size etc. The font size obviously will depend on the size of the button you have drawn.

I would suggest using BOLD type, in black, but it's up to you, really!

Type your button label into the text editor and click O.K. when done.

Click/Drag the text frame and place it onto your button.

The "floating inside" illusion is best preserved if the top part of your text is overlaying the white "reflection" at this point!

Now click MODIFY>ARRANGE>SEND BACKWARD to put the text inside the button.

As you can see at the top of the page, I've enhanced the illusion by applying a soft drop-shadow to the text whilst it is still selected (EFFECTS>SHADOW AND GLOW>DROP SHADOW).

And that's your MAC-style button done!