Dans Tuts

I hate side menus. I always have, I prefer having as much content on the screen as I can (ok I know this blog don’t conform to that, but I mean generally). Never the less side menus are needed with most sites that want to display more than just navigation links. Here is a short tutorial on creating a bubble style navigation menu.

First create your document, I used the values:

Width: 900 Pixels
Height: 700 Pixels
Background: Transparent.

Of course if you feel more comfortable with having a small display window that’s fine, but for me the extra spaces gives me an area to play around in.

Create a new layer (Layer – new – Layer) Set your color to be #aaccef. Now using the rounded rectangle tool create a rectangle with Radius of 7.

Make the rectangle slightly smaller than you want the width of the navigation menu to be. The size of the menu is all dependant on what you really want to use it for, never the less I use the values 175 Pixels. By this time you should have something like:

Create a new layer (Layer – New – Layer) Now once again use the rounded rectangle change the radius from 7 to 11 and the color to #d4e5f6. Starting drawing a rectangle on top of your previous rectangle but slightly smaller, leaving a larger gap at the top than the bottom (see picture below)

It’s already a nice looking side bar. Of course we want to really make it stronger when it comes to standing out. For this we shall add a drop shadow on the first layer, so select it from the Layers menu section then right click and select Blending Options

You should now see the blending options window, on this window select the Drop Shadow tab item then use the following settings:

Blend Mode: Normal
Opacity: 75%
Noise: 0
Color: #4155a1

Now we want to add a stroke. To do this click the Stroke option in the Blending Options window. We will use the follow details to give it a light bordered style.

Size: 2 Pixels
Position: Outside
Blend Mode: Normal
Opacity: 100%
Fill Type: Color

This should create a very nice elegant and smooth border around the box, without using to many dark colors. Next we want to move onto the finishing touches. We’re going to use a icon to give our navigation box some more interest, the icon you use is up to you, and you can find some fantastic icons here. Because of the blue nature of the menu, and because I like fish I shall be using this fantastic icon from TurboMilk. Download the icon you plan to use in PNG format at the biggest size you can. Then in photoshop open the icon you downloaded

The icon will open in a full window. Because of this we want to click the inner minimize icon as indicated in the image below. This should make the icon window around the same size of the icon

We now want to drag our icon onto our menu document (make sure you have the move tool selected, press v to activate the move tool. Once you’ve moved the icon into your menu document you can let go of the mouse. Now still using the move tool navigate the icon to the top left of the menu. Then press CLT and T together to activate the transform options slightly angle the icon (see image below)

You should now have something like the below image. That’s the end of this short tutorial. The method is extremely easy to do, and so much so at one point when Photoshop crashed it only took me 40 seconds to recreate the menu.

Here is a PSD Of the menu (Sliced!)
Please give your feedback on the guide! I’d love to hear it!