With this tutorial I am going to show you how to make this simple header.
Click for full size image
1. Start by creating a new document with the setting shown below. (of course you can use a different size if you wish)
2. Go to View -> New Guide and create a horizontal guide at 160 pixels.
3. Select the Rectangular Marquee tool and make a selection from the top of the document until the guide like in the screenshot below.
4. Set your foreground color to red and the background color to orange.
5. Select the Gradient tool and apply a linear gradient (foreground to background) to your selection. You should get something like this.
6. Select the Rectangular Marquee tool again but this time apply these settings.
7. Make a selection just below the guide and the gradient.
8. Create a new layer, (Layer -> New -> Layer) name it black stripe and fill the selection with black. Then Create another two new layers and fill the one with a dark grey and the other one with a light grey (name them grey stripe and light grey stripe respectively). Your layers palette should now look like this.
9. Move the “grey stripe” layer below the “black stripe” layer and the “light grey stripe” below both of them. The result should be like the screenshot below.
10. Duplicate the “black stripe” layer (Layer->Duplicate Layer) and move it at the bottom of the document.
11. Now merge the four stripes layers. Pick the Magic Wand tool and click on the space between the three stripes and the black stripe layer at the bottom. You should get a selection like the one below.
12. Fill that selection with a linear gradient (grey to white)
13. Now select the text tool and add your desired links names to the navigation bar (I used the Tahoma font).
14. Select the line tool
set the color to black and draw a black line between the first and the second link.
15. Duplicate the black line layer and set the line’s color to white. You can do that by applying a color overlay style to the layer or by changing the color of the layer by double clicking on it. Now move the white line layer one pixel to the right.
16. Repeat this step for all the spaces between the links.
17. Now copy your logo to the header. For this tutorial I used a quick logo I just made. The logo was black and I reduced it’s opacity to 50% in order to blend better with the header colors.
18. Add your text with your desired font. (I also reduced the opacity of the text layer to 50%)
19. We are almost done, we just need to do one more thing. Create a new layer (Layer->New->Layer), set the foreground color to white and select the gradient tool. We are going to apply a white to transparent gradient to our header.
Apply these settings for the gradient.
20. Now draw a linear gradient with the settings shown above from the top up to about the middle of our document.
And here is our final result scaled down.
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