How to make the colored stroke around butons

[jahilton2002]

Hi guys,

whats the best method to make the colored stroke around the buttons on the control panel artwork.

whats the technique or is it just an overlay that can be downloaded.

here is an example. (orange and yellow area around the main buttons)



thx

[Kyle W]

Easiest way I know of is in Illustrator, there are a couple of different ways to do it but I will give you the easiest. 

First thing, Draw buttons in circles. Then UNITE circles using the pathfinder tool.  Then duplicate your buttons and PASTE IN PLACE.  Grab one of the layers then open your appearance palette.  Add a NEW STROKE and increase the size of the stroke.  Multiple strokes can be added for different colors etc.  Try it out, you will get the hang of it.

The other way is a little more difficult, but I feel gives a more precision.  First Draw button circles.  Then group circles.  Next go to OBJECT, PATH, OFFSET PATH.  click the preview button and crank up the pixel number on top.  Then when you are happy with how large the path is click ok.  Then go to your pathfinder and click UNITE. 

Those are two ways to do it. 

Kyle

[dandro]

I have been playing around with this too.. I use a free editing tool called GIMP, because free/cheap and pass less traveled is how I roll (sometimes not by choice). Anyway I also found that when doing the circles, you can do a drop shadow which will give you a nice glowing affect from the edge, which I have been using on my art. I am learning that it would probably be less time consuming and more accurate to create the button art rather than a layer, since resizing it, PPI, etc all seem to come into play. I am learning a lot, especially with the help of these amazing guys here too.

[Felsir]

A trick in photoshop is to use the layer blending options. First there is the stroke option, which is kinda self explanatory. This creates that 1st level outline stroke.
The trick comes when you want the double stroke: use drop shadow, blendmode normal, 100% opacity. Distance 0px, 100% spread and set the size to your strokesize + the width of the 2nd stroke.

You can do other things like creating selections and expanding them, but unlike Illustrator (which uses math to create perfect circles) Photoshop will have distorted shapes because of rounding errors (to the nearest pixel) getting bigger each expanding pixelsize.
Best is to create a circle with the circle selection tool the size you want and align (and duplicate) them using the layer alignment tools.