Step 2: Create Some Button Shapes

First off, you'll want to show the grid and set Photoshop to snap to the grid when drawing your vectors. This makes it a lot easier to create, move, and modify your vectors! I use a grid size of sixteen pixels, with four subdivisions, which shows a grid line every four pixels. This works really well for my Pronto layouts, but you can use any size grid you like. To quickly show or hide the grid (and turn on and off snapping) you can use the keyboard shortcut <Ctrl-H>.

Choose a color, and create some button shapes in a new layer with one of the shape tools. For this example I'm using the rounded rectangle tool, my favorite starting point for designing buttons. I created one rounded rectangle with a radius of eight pixels, using the grid to make sure it's a useful size, selected it with the path selection tool, copied it, and then pasted the shape four times to add more buttons to the layer, moving them around as needed with the path selection tool. Finally, name the layer something useful, like 'Buttons'.

I've turned the grid off in the second example to show you what the buttons look like. Pretty flat and uninteresting, huh?

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