Graphical Buttons

1) Even if you're not artistically inclined it's still really easy to make nice graphical buttons if you know where to look. There are literally thousands of sites dedicated to fonts and picture fonts known as dingbats. These dingbats can be anything from cartoon faces to floral designs and can be very useful in button creation as they are stored as fonts and can be used as such. Have a look at some examples below:

Dingbats come in all shapes and sizes and can easily be adapted to make effective graphical buttons.

2) The first step in generating graphical buttons is to download the fonts from the web. Fonts on the web are often freeware meaning you can legally download them and use them on your site, but you should check for restrictions anyway. A couple of the popular sites are www.acidfonts.com and www.dingbatpages.com but there are thousands out there. Just keep looking.

4) Once you've found the font or dingbat you want download it onto your machine. This will have to Unzipped and extract the font files ( .ttf file) to the FONT directory on your machine. This can usually be found at C:/Windows/Fonts.

5) Once the new font is unzipped into the Fonts folder it can be used in any program, including Photoshop. So open up Photoshop and start typing using the new font.

6) You can also experiment with layer styles by adding drop shadow or bevel effects like in the example above.

Remember though if you are using graphical buttons, it is often a good idea to have a text explanation underneath. There's nothing more annoying than a random button that doesn't explain the link clearly.