Forum User Bar Tutorial

Made by: Nick

A userbar is a small bar image that people often use in their signatures of forums. These quite often carry the logo/name of a company or program to show that the person is a user of that website/software/whatever. These userbars can be easily created by photoshop, and in this tutorial I will show you how to create one.

Okay, first we will have to make a new pattern that we will use in making the userbar, so make a 3 px by 3px new canvas.





Zoom to the maximum (3200%) and make three square selections this way.





and fill the selected area.





Or you can simply make three black dots with the pencil tool in a diagonal line.

Now we need to define the pattern. Go to Edit>define pattern.



 

Name it whatever you want and click OK!



 

Now make a new document, with 350 px Width and 20 px height.



 

Use the Gradient tool



 

and make the gradient of color you want (I made it grey to black for a subtle change in colour)



 

and paint the background with this gradient vertically



 

After that Write some text, use the font "Letter Gothic std" and the size 10 pt



 

now lets add the logo, here I have this logo from our website



 

import the logo to the userbar file and then resize it so it fits the scene
 




Now make a new layer



 

Then from Edit>Fill select the pattern that you made at the start of the tutorial.
 



 

Change the pattern layer Opacity to 50%



 

You may finish by this step, or if your like me and would like to emphasise the text a little then add an effect to the text, from fx menu, select Outer Glow for the text layer by either double clicking on the layer or from the fx menu.



 

Use settings similar to this and then Click OK!



 

Final result

My end result looked like this. It was a simple effect and I think that it created a pretty nice end result.