We make our icons in Photoshop or Pixelmator, but if you want a simpler way of adding some transparency to your icons, check out Matt Petrowsky’s Theme Studio. The icons themselves are also slightly transparent so they also look good on almost any dark background.Same with the stroke on the hover and pressed states: white with 28% opacity so we don’t need to change it often.This means they look good on almost any darker background and we don’t need to change that up just because we move the button to the dark-grey header or a layout, for example.

The hover and pressed fill colors are white with 4% or 10% opacity. Though we ended up not using this kind of button, the slicing trick is worth looking at if you haven’t seen it. Also related to padding, we need to use a very cool/tricky hack of the “slice” option in order to get the image to stay to the left of the text.png –another thing we’d have to keep track of through each of our button-state images. Since an image file doesn’t respect padding, we need to include the left hand padding of the icon IN the icon’s.We need a different icon for each state, so if we ever needed this where hover wasn’t “white” we’d need to make a whole new set of icons.

This looks great but has a few big problems if we were going to use this technique everywhere: In this way of making a button the icon is a fill of the button itself and we use a different fill image for each button state. Here is what we tried at first, and you’ll see that the icon gets brighter, just like the text does, when you hover over it. Original idea- now discarded First version.

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