The Xara Trompe L'Oeil Room Page 11
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My original plan was to create a Button Bar with irregular buttons. I really wanted to do this because most buttons on most sites are pretty static. I wanted a more organic button interface.

I thought I could modify the shape of the buttons once created by dropping new irregular buttons onto the appropriate layers.

Wrong.

After spending several frustrating days, I gave up and created the previous tutorial. But when I was assembling the last image of the tutorial, showing the image slices, it dawned on me how to do the irregular shaped buttons. All will be revealed in this short mini-tutorial.

I created two organic shapes for the back bar and applied two different leaf fills from the Clipart Gallery, Photography 1 folder. Text and a drop shadow was added to the top and all the BackBar elements were grouped.

I decided to create six buttons, and I only wanted the buttons to use the tall, slim foreground shape.

My buttons will need to be wide enough to contain all the tall slim shape. And, my buttons will need to be stacked vertically and centered.

I made a rectangle exactly 140 pixels wide by 20 pixels deep and positioned it where the first button is to appear.

The first rectangle was selected, and 6 buttons and a BackBar were created.

The color will change and is not important.

Four button states were then created. Again, color is not important. Just creating the different button states is what's important.

For reasons best known to the Xara product development team, the buttons created were not evenly spaced, so I re-spaced them using my guidelines.

Then when I was selecting the buttons and BackBar in the Name Gallery, there were two additional in-between buttons, which I deleted leaving the BackBar and the six buttons shown here.

I selected the title bars, then pressed Select to select all the elements.

With all necessary elements selected in the Name Gallery , the Button and Navbar Tool was selected and the Export button pressed on the Infobar (not in the Name Gallery).

16 Colors Color Depth and Error Diffusion Dithering options were selected.

Pressing Export created all the named button states and the sliced BackBar image.

Are you with me so far?