Create a Glossy Home Icon in Photoshop

June 20th, 2008 in Photoshop

Wheres the homepage? Why not add a glossy homepage icon to your website to help your visitors navigate around your website. In this tutorial I’ll teach you how to make a simple, glossy icon that you can use on your website.

Learn how to design your very own glossy home icon in Photoshop

Heres what we will be making:

1.

Firstly start by creating a new document in Photoshop, or of course, opening up a template you’ve made previously. I simply used a new document size 400 x 300 pixels. I then added in a light blue/white gradient for the background.

2.

Create a new layer (Layer > New > Layer) then using the Elliptical Marquee Tool make a perfectly-rounded selection in the middle of the document somewhere.

You can fill this selection with any old color, just go with Black for now (#000000)

Going into the Blending Options for this orb layer, apply this Gradient Overlay.

And now you will have a gradient-filled orb like so:

3.

Again using the Elliptical Marquee Tool, make a smaller size selection near the left edges of your first orb.

On a new layer draw a light-blue gradient inside of your selection as shown below. Note that you can use either Color to Transparent or Color to Black.

With your selection still active, move your selection up to the left and upwards, to do this hold Shift and press the up/left keys.

Inverse your selection by right-clicking the selection and going to Select Inverse, then press delete to remove everything on the outside of the selection.

To make it look quite a bit nicer you can change the layer mode for the gradient layer to Screen, also lower the opacity if necesary.

Finish off by adding one more shine gradient in the bottom-right of your orb.

4.

Now let’s add in shape that defines the icon. Find and get out the Custom Shape Tool.

Go into the shapes and make sure you have all sets selected.

Scroll down to the bottom of your shapes and find the Home shape.

Now create a new layer underneath all of the shine layers you made, hold shift and draw your shape out. You might need to change the Custom Shape Tool settings for it to come out as a solid shape.

Note that I used #9bcae5 as the color for my home icon.

You will get a home icon that looks like this after applying the following layer styles:

5.

Now you just have to merge the layers together and make a much smaller version. You can resize it down by pressing CTRL+T then dragging the corners inwards whilst holding shift.

Thanks for reading! If you want you can download the PSD file from here.

Tags: home icon, photoshop icons