How to make a userbar by pyost


Lately the userbars have become very popular with people. They are mostly putting them in their forum signatures, which is very practical. They are small, but can be used for linking.

A lot of userbars can be found at www.userbars.com and www.userbars.org, but sometimes people can't find exactly what they want. This is why I have decided to make a tutorial on how to make you own userbar.

The pictures in this tutorial are made in Photoshop 6.0, so don't be surprised if you're Photoshop is different. I will be making a Thunderbird userbar.

First of all, you have to create a new picture. The dimensions are as shown in the picture below.



Next, you must choose you background color. It is best to use the gradient tool and the colors that would suit the thing you are making a bar for. In this case, I will be using a light blue color going to white (because of the Thunderbird logo).

It should look like this.



Now, we must add the diagonal lines seen in all the userbars. To do this, create a new picture, dimensions 6x6 pixels and transparent. Next, use the pencil tool on that picture to create a diagonal line like this.



When you draw that, go to Edit -> Define Pattern and choose the pattern name. Now go back to the first picture and the Pattern Stamp Tool in order to put lines into you picture. Since the lines are too bold, I would advise you to lower the opacity. I use 15% myself, but it's up to you to decide. After doing that, you get something like this.



Now it's time to add the logo to the picture. The logo must have transparent background, so when you put it it should look like this.



Now we've got only two things left. The first one is to add text to the userbar. For this, most people use the Visitor -BRK- font. That's what I'm going to use, too. When you choose the font tool, choose Palettes and do the following. Set the font size to 10pt, turn of anti aliasing, and increase the character spacing to 25. When you write the text, use the stroke option to create a black or white 1 pixel border, depending on the font color. Here's what you should get.



Then, you should add the elliptic transparent white part. In order to do that, choose the Ellipse Tool, select Create Filled Region and set the opacity to 30% or less to get the best quality. Create a new ellipse with this tool so that it's bottom part is located in the top of the picture.

The final thing to do is to add a 1 pixel border to the whole picture, and do it with around 20% opacity. I hope that there is no need to explain this. And here is the product – Thunderbird userbar.



If you have any further questions or want to comment my tutorial, you are free to do so.

This post has been edited by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG: Feb 5 2006, 04:27 PM

Nice, you should submit this to the tutorial topic of Userbars.com. They already have alot but one more wouldn't do any harm now would it?

As you can probably tell, I love userbars.

Sweet tutorial. But why do all these userbars have the same design all the time? As in with the transparent eclipse across the userbar and the diagonal striped lines? I mean it looks great and cool but its like ipods. Where the circlular navigation pad on it is what makes it so "hipp" and everyone thinks its cool. I guess that applies to this too?

First of all, not all the userbars have the same pattern. Some have diagonal lines, while other have artistic dots Also, some don't have the transpart ellipse. Your iPod example was really good. If somebody tried to make a variation, the public probably wouldn't like it.

In other news, here's an Astahost userbar by me

User bars looks nice, even though I don't look at them very seriously, but they are great. But when people, like above ads lots of them, it does not look normal in my opinion, to much is to much

As I don't own photoshop, only the Gimp, I still want to make userbars, so I found this easy tutorial to do it, if somebody is interested how to do it using Gimp, here is the link:

http://www.userbars.com/gimp_tutorial/gimb...or_userbars.htm

( Link doesn't work anymore, at least for me, so try this one: http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/topic/Make-A...imp-9605-1.html )

It's really easy, there are so much of those user bars, but maybe making a bit different ones, of already existing, is good too the bad side is that anyone can steal your custom userbar on which you worked

This post has been edited by Quatrux: Apr 3 2007, 06:56 PM

Very nice tutorial! Thanks for sharing this. Here's mine:


-=jeroen=-

You might consider registaring at www.userbars.org. There you can upload your own creations and comment others'. I already have about 10 of my userbars over there

Here are some more of me. (nice idea to upload them to userbars.org, I uploaded them all.






Hope you like them,
-=jeroen=-

Nice work It's good to see more people interested in this. The only thing I don't like is the font on the thompson addict userbar. It's a bit hard to see. Try using a white font with a black stroke around (or any color that you fancy)

hey! this is very nice little tutorial, and userbars are cool too. Good work...