Plastic Button

This is a pretty straightforward example of a "plastic" button which follows very closely the techniques used in the Glass Button tutorial.

(See Glass Button tutorial if you need a refresher on the steps to do this).

Creating your Button

The main difference between glass/plastic buttons is that "plastic" buttons tend to have a "harder", more reflective surface. So, start by creating a basic button like so:

Draw a circle using the elipse tool and apply your chosen fill colour. Copy and Paste (or click EDIT>CLONE) a duplicate on top of this image. Click the Arrow tool in the toolbox, then change the fill colour for this duplicate to WHITE using the paintbucket tool.

Click MODIFY>ALTER PATH>INSET PATH and choose to inset the path by 5 pixels "INSIDE".

When you have done this, clone this re-sized white circle. Now, using the arrow keys, nudge the top "selected" circle downwards until you get something like the image below:

You can now see BOTH white circles, with the top image still selected. Press and hold the SHIFT key, then carefully click the BACK white circle to include it in your selection. When you see that both circles are selected, click MODIFY>COMBINE>PUNCH and you should end up with the image below:

The white crescent forms our edge highlight. We now need to apply some softening blur to this crescent by clicking in the EFFECTS panel and selecting BLUR>GAUSSIAN BLUR from the drop-down menu.

Set the Gaussian blur level in the dialogue box which opens up to 0.5 (this will give a slightly "harder" highlight effect).

To give your button some general edge definition, select the button and click EFFECTS>SHADOW AND GLOW>INNER GLOW. Set the "Inner Glow"colour swatch to a darker variation of your button's fill colour, with a width of 2, and softness of 2.

The final step is to apply a little bit of diffuse reflection by clicking in the FILL panel drop-down menu to select RADIAL fill. This should centre a nice, soft, glowing hotspot on your image as shown below:

The "spread" of this effect can be reduced/increased by click/dragging the SQUARE handle. Dragging the ROUND handle will change the centre of impact for the hotspot.

Experiment!

And there you have it - a basic plastic button! All that remains is for you to apply your button label using the Text Editor (see below) and you're done!