3by9

Critical Thinking, hard yet necessary

There were a couple of lists floating around, rules for startups. On the whole, the lists weren’t bad, but like all lists, they can tend to fall short. There isn’t a formula to have a successful startup, if only it were that easy. I must say of the lists I read, I enjoyed Mark Cuban’s the most.

Enjoy = it makes the most sense

For example, point #1: Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love. This makes sense. Startups are like children, they need dedication, love, patience, and hard work. If the startup is not something the individuals are extremely dedicated to, the end result will not be enough to compete with companies putting their all behind their product or service, leading to point #2: If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.

Why do most startups fail? Same reason why many commercial bloggers do not have the success they would like. Unrealistic expectations. Everyone isn’t meant to have their own business just like everyone isn’t mean to be a doctor, lawyer, police officer, etc. A startling number of people enter into the commercial arena with zero business experience, and without the inclination to take some classes (gain some knowledge) to help them excel.

To complete my degrees I had to finish a series of classes called Critical Thinking. I hated those classes (I cannot put into words how much I hated those classes). I understood the point of them but I hated them. The classes forced students to consider all the issues in a situation and prompted the student to be creative in their thought process.

A lot of students failed those classes.

Seriously, they were tough. We received questions like this:

Lab technician Jim collects a culture from a patient on which the doctor previously operated. Jim carefully collects pus from a wound on the leg of the patient using a toothpick and then, seeing another wound on the face of the patient, washes the face wound with iodine and, using the same toothpick, collects serum from that wound. Jim drops the toothpick into a tube of nutrient broth, puts the name of the doctor on the broth culture tube, and takes it to the lab on the way home from work. List the mistakes Jim made.

Or:

Two airports A and B are 400 miles apart, and B is due east of airport A. A plane flew from A to B in 2 hours and then returned to airport A in 2 1/2 hours. If the wind blew from due west with a constant velocity during the entire trip, find the speed of the the plane in still air and the speed of the wind.

And let’s not forget:

Although 95% of the crust of the Earth is composed of either igneous or metamorphic rock, 75% of the exposed surface of the continental crust is sedimentary rock. This is because

a. erosion of surface soil and rocks has produced a veneer of sediments over most of the Earth, and lithification of these sediments has produced sedimentary rock strata
b. the temperature of the Earth increases downward, leading to the creation of vast amounts of igneous and metamorphic rocks
c. oceanic crust, which covers about 70% of the Earth’s surface, is largely composed of igneous rocks, such as basalt, which forms at oceanic ridges
d. constitute such a small percentage of the surface of the Earth that they contribute much less material to the surface than do physical and chemical precipitation of sediment

Each class the questions were harder but the point was to make the student “think” about the situation and not pick what might appear to be the obvious answer, to avoid skipping steps in the thought process and to do the work necessary to achieve the right answer (because there is only one right answer). Eventually the questions moved to business related situations which again, had one optimal answer. Knowing the answer (exit plan) doesn’t mean the pieces can be put together to form the question (product or service that will gain the exit expectation).

This is why people who have an exit strategy in their mind tend to fail before they get the company strong enough to be considered a realistic option for sale. The person has the end goal (exit) on their mind and most likely will do everything possible to quickly achieve that goal, working backwards to form the product or service.

Making the product or service meet their exit plans instead focusing on making their product or service a strong competitor in the market, justifying their exit projection.

Where Are The Game Changers?

Here’s the lifecycle for new companies that launch in the tech (*cough* The Valley) industry:

1. Cool, new service comes out, people like it.
2. The PR machine ramps up, this service is heralded as “the next big thing”.
3. People want to jump on the bandwagon so they create piggyback services that either use its API or data in some way to do something auxiliary. Or they take the original concept and create a copycat service.
4. Venture capitalists finally get wind of what’s going on, invest in some of the biggest of these bandwagon ideas and talk about how they’re the new game changers.
5. More people create auxiliary services looking to cash in on the VC interest, these services fail to latch on.
6. The cool, original service jumps the shark, people create a cool, new service and people like it, go back to Step 2.

Some companies who defined Step 1, off the top of my head, were Upcoming (what’s going on locally), Facebook (social network), Flickr (Web 2.0 photo sharing), and Twitter (what you’re doing). Out of those four, only one launched in the past few years, the other three are “old” in the age of the Internet.

Web 2.0, as defined by people who obviously got their definition from someone smarter than themselves, is about sharing, remixing, and connecting. Or something like that. Too bad all this sharing and remixing doesn’t really make much of a real company with real revenues, and unless you’re a Big Dog in the social networking world, the whole “connecting” thing means you cobbled together a few APIs into a service that’s pre-revenue.

Sure, new companies have started up based on new ideas, but they’re unsexy and haven’t changed the whole playing field like other companies have. Twitter created a whole new medium for communication. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re a game changer. The dozen web apps that let you manage your finances online? Not so much. The dozen more Ajax homepage portals? Nope, not them either.

What companies or services do you think are, or are going to be, game changers?

If You Don’t Own The Geeks, Own Someone Else

Pownce is a nice service. I have a Pownce account that I never use. I guess being a nice service doesn’t mean you will get any use out of it.

Pownce has a pretty website and killer client UI. Nobody really talks about Pownce like they do Twitter. That’s kind of weird since it looks way better than Twitter.

Pownce never goes down. Twitter goes down all the time. People talk about leaving Twitter, but yet they stay. That’s just crazy.

Pownce has the perfect team in place to utilize the power of personalities. Leah Culver is a geek and you really don’t get much cuter than that when you think about geeks. Kevin Rose is also on the team, you might have heard of him as well and the kind of pull he has. With those two alone there is no reason Pownce shouldn’t already be overtaking Twitter.

What the hell happened?

You could argue that they took too long to release an API. Yeah that might have hurt a little bit, but isn’t damaging enough.

Then I guess you could argue that keeping it in closed beta prevented it from spreading like wildfire. That hurts as well, but invite only betas have worked plenty of times before in the past so there really is no justification for why it would be the cause of failure this time.

Next argument I would go with is that Kevin Rose didn’t use all his power to really pimp the service. This is more damaging than the previous two arguments, but I still don’t think it is what hurts them.

Here is my argument, which I believe trumps all the rest:

If you don’t own the geeks, own someone else.

Twitter owns the geeks. Jaiku owned the European geeks and people who were pissed at Twitter. That leaves Pownce with the other 90% of the world to conquer. Tough right?

What’s that you say? You need the geek crowd first because they are the early adopters? They are the fools who try out any new technology and then pass it on to the normies of the world? Bullshit. Sure in some cases it’s true, but name me a couple of successful companies that made it big because the geeks took control and I bet you I can name you more that hit the big time from normies being the early adopters.

Now I will admit reaching the people you don’t really associate with can be really difficult. If Pownce wants to make a good run at it though I think they should go for it. Screw the feature pimping, nobody cares about file-sharing and in fact that probably hurts them because people wonder what’s the point in using a service that doesn’t replace email. I won’t drop them any hints on how they can achieve hitting the people that would take the service over the top, but if they sit down and do some thinking they will figure it out.

You know why US companies are seeing a greater potential in China than in the US? It’s not a difficult question. There are way more people in China. There are more non-geeks than TechCrunch people on the web. Why do we always go for the smaller group? Are we just more comfortable trying to reach them?

Does it surprise you that Digg hasn’t been bought although they have been actively trying to sell it for the (rumored) past year?

Now I am not telling you to go out and try to get the other 90% of the web’s population, that would be crazy. Seth Godin says “the more people you reach the more likely it is you are reaching the wrong people”, which I still have no idea what he is talking about considering he runs a company that needs quantity over quality (sorry I won’t link to it since I hate it). Hell, just forget I even quoted him this time.

It’s a basic business principle: find your niche. Unfortunately “everyone” doesn’t count as a niche. Pownce needs to find a group that would actually feel their app is useful. I’m not saying the geek crowd is already lost to them, but you can win easier battles elsewhere.

If push comes to shove just have Leah post some scandalous pics of herself (sex sells, admit it) or start a cool argument with Kevin Rose about the tryst they had last night to draw some attention.

The Future Is Movable

There’s a reason I didn’t use the word mobile in the title of this entry, and that’s mainly because when people think of mobile anything they think it sucks. They think it’s a scaled down, kiddy version of the real thing. This line of thinking was essentially correct up until recently, when products like the Samsung Q2 UMPC, Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, and Apple iPhone appeared and showed where mobile technology was really headed. Now you’ve got an entire computer the size of a Sega Game Gear, so is this the future?

Computing’s future is going to be split down the middle, with desktop-class machines getting faster and cheaper, and movable machines (laptops, UMPCs, iPhones) getting smaller and more connected.

As far as software is concerned, this is both a great and terrible concept at the same time. It’s terrible because now you have iPhone users accessing your web application from their phones and you feel compelled to slim it down and make it more iPhone-compatible. It’s a great concept because movable computing has spawned new industries, new niches, new ways to add value to someone’s computing life. People have a finite amount of time during the day, and they’re displacing old interests with things like Twitter and Qik. When people are doing something new instead of what they were doing before, there is now an opportunity in making that new activity as entertaining or productive as possible, for profit. Look at all the companies making money in the cell phone wallpaper industry, the ringtone industry, the “text 34554 to 3443 to get X sent back to you” industry. Yes, those are all million-dollar industries that didn’t exist a few years ago. These all sprouted up in response to the changing tastes and needs of users who now have computing devices in their pockets all day long. People can IM, text, and email their friends no matter where they are, not to mention take pictures, stream videos, visit websites, play games, oh and make phone calls. Each function that a movable device has is another opportunity to do something better, faster, or cheaper than the next guy and turn a profit.

Simple cell phone functions like ringtones, texting, and picture-taking have been created brand new companies around them, but what features that have yet to become ubiquitous?

• Mobile video.
• Mobile gaming with touchscreen controls.
• GPS in your cell phone.

iPhone SDK Coming In Weeks

I predict many new companies and software niches to pop up once the iPhone SDK launches in February. It’s going to be just a matter of time before people are shooting video with their iPhone and then performing iMovie-like editing operations on it from within the iPhone before directly uploading it to YouTube. It won’t be long before some really awesome games are released for the iPhone that have interactive controls far beyond what mobile games are currently employing. Mobile ordering products for stores like Starbucks.

Each new function that is launched will create a brand new company out of thin air. Then there will be 5 other companies created to compete with that market leader, and then you’ve got an industry that didn’t exist a year ago.

3by9 Podcast #10

The team goes back to audio-only after having a audio-video extravaganza over at 9rules a few days before. It’s a little weird to only hear the person and not see their face again but we make due, with hilarious and unexpected results. The two services we’re talking about in the first part are Mogulus and Ustream.tv. Topics for Part 1:

• Video vs. audio. Which is more interesting? Which is easier to start with?
• Discovering new things on the web really does make lives more interesting.
• Should you think about scale off the bat? The “What If” scenarios sneak up on ya if you don’t…
• Plan for now vs. plan for the future. You gotta do both if you want to win.

Cop Part 1 of Podcast #10. Streaming kills puppies.

Now Part 2 it really gets interesting:

• Mike blurts out random things at random times, Paul and Tyme rightfully laugh at him.
• Personalities coming through on video vs. audio. Why is Vinvin from Seesmic funny?
• Is Oprah a sellout? Does she get revenues from the books she picks?
• Mike busts Tyme’s chops about word pronunciation. Paul and Tyme bust Mike’s chops for being anal. Gross.
• Grammar-checking software for new English speakers. Should you use it?

Cop Part 2 of Podcast #10.

Obligatory 2008 Predictions In Tech

Everyone does a 2008 tech industry prediction post, and why stop the fun when I can join in my own special way?

Twitter != Business

Twitter has raised a few million dollars, mainly to build out their architecture and make sure their numerous outages of yesteryear don’t occur as frequently in the future. Geeky people like Twitter because it’s yet another medium that lets us get on our soapbox and pretend that what we have to say is interesting. Non-geeky people like Twitter… oh wait they don’t. I don’t know anyone who’s not tech-minded who even knows what Twitter is.

Twitter is essentially in the same boat as Meebo with regards to monetization strategy. People are used to IM being free, and perhaps somewhat ad-supported (but nobody clicks on those AIM ads anyway, in fact people go through great hoops to block them from appearing). Twitter is like sending SMS text messages, but they’re published on the web for anyone to see. People are used to paying a few bucks per month for sending SMS messages, but the act of texting has no additional cost. Twitter has already given away the cow in regards to sending messages, as you can send as many as you want for absolutely no charge. If they instituted some paid service levels regarding how many Twits you can post in a month (100 for $5, 250 for $10, etc.) then a lot of people are going to be upset since they’ll be charged for what they got for free before. If Twitter goes the advertising route, they could do Twit-advertising that gets blasted to phones every X messages you receive, but that’s bound to upset people as well who are on a pay-as-you-go SMS messaging plan. The folks behind Twitter may have to revert to simply showing ads on Twitter profile pages, but then you’ll have to deal with the Twitter API users who access 10x more Twitter data than normal web visitors. Ev Williams is a big proponent of creating a solid platform first and letting the business part take care of itself, but in this case I feel like Twitter has potentially tied its hands because all the killer features and uses of Twitter are already completely free.

Apple Stays Strong

Apple is in a position to really do some damage in the smartphone market, and perhaps the entire cell phone industry. The iPhone blows away all other cell phone competitors in terms of customer satisfaction my a ridiculous margin, so that means people are telling their non-Apple-fanatic friends about their good experience. This may not lead everybody to go out and snag iPhones, but if they don’t already have an MP3 player or are looking for a new laptop, Apple is solid in both those areas enough to warrant a second look.

As far as the iPhone is concerned, Apple simply needs to continue to push out quality software upgrades (with major upgrades every 6-8 months, hopefully one of those comes soon) and get people salivating for whatever the iPhone v2.0 is going to look like. If Apple decides to expand the iPhone line, they just need to be careful about hackers who can turn an iPhone Lite into a fully-fledged iPhone with some software upgrades.

Facebook Plateaus

I’ve always said that Facebook has no chance of surpassing MySpace, and my reasoning is that almost everyone who has a Facebook account also has a MySpace page, but not many people who are on MySpace are going to feel like they’re missing something by not also having a Facebook account. Everybody is on MySpace, and a subset of them are on Facebook as well. If you want to reach the most people, it’s MySpace you go to.

Facebook has made some major mistakes this past year in how they roll-out new features. The news feed feature upset a lot of people off, and now the beacon advertising fiasco has betrayed users’ trust once again. MySpace rarely rolls out new features, mainly because I can see them following the formula of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” which is a traditional mindset of a company leading its industry. Small tweaks here and there, a new logged-in homepage, less downtime, faster pageloads, these are all things that MySpace has rolled out successfully in the past few months. What they’re focused on now is business development and ad sales, and they do that extremely well (and have even pioneered some brand new banner sizes.) Facebook’s additions look like they’re thinking too hard in an effort to out-do MySpace, and in an effort to push things out quickly they stumble where it matters. Facebook still doesn’t allow users to customize the look and feel of their pages, nor do they allow you to see people’s profiles if you’re not in the same network or friends with them. Both of these features are the hallmark of MySpace’s user experience, which is a large reason why they are still the king of social networking. If Facebook really wants to compete with MySpace, then they need to give in and allow these features for their users.

37signals Hits “The Enterprise”

Jason Fried has never really been a fan of “enterprise software”, mainly because he thinks it’s crowded and overblown on the user experience’s side. When you combine a few of their products together and look at the featureset, 37signals’ offerings are very close to what companies are paying large amounts for. In a recent post they pondered where company intranets went, but the conversation quickly turned to “what my company uses” and a large percentage of big companies are still using Microsoft Sharepoint for daily collaboration. I could see 37signals building out an integrated suite catering to these corporate users, combining a few of their applications (Basecamp, Campfire, Highrise) along with some new functionality into a mega-package that they could then market to Sharepoint customers at a fraction of the cost. Of course that “fraction” would still be a lot more than they sell to consumers at via web-based versions, so they’d hit a pretty solid niche.

What Internet Users Really Want

TechCrunch, one of the most well-trafficked websites documenting the tech industry, gets over 5 million pageviews per month (source) which comes out to about 166k pageviews per day. That’s about one third the pageviews Fleshbot (NSFW) gets per day which is the adult brand within Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire. I only put these two together because Fleshbot is simply one adult blog within the gigantic masses of all the other adult blogs and sites on the web, and although it only has the tiniest fraction of adult Internet mindshare, it still does some serious traffic, far surpassing the largest blog in the Web 2.0 world. Now compare Fleshbot’s traffic to Perez Hilton who does over 6 million pageviews a day, and you’ll see yet another huge gap.

The Tech Industry Is Like A Puddle In The Web’s Ocean Of Opportunity

When entrepreneurs and investors like to talk about the biggest Web 2.0 “wins” — MySpace, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Skype — they’re not really talking about companies within the traditional “Web 2.0″ space but the ones who used web technologies to power something outside the scope of the tech industry. Everybody has social networking profiles. Everyone likes to see funny or viral videos. Everyone likes the ability to talk to others around the world for free. Everybody has photos they’d like to share, or likes to view their friends’ photos. Technologists within the web industry may think of Flickr as the champion of various web technologies, but that wasn’t the reason they were bought. Flickr had an appeal to people who weren’t techie at all, they just wanted a great place to share their pictures. YouTube may have brought video sharing capabilities to the masses and brought about the Flash Video revolution, but the most popular YouTube videos of all time are simply funny or dumb videos that are interesting to normal people who don’t care about Flash Video or the technologies that made that video view possible.

For companies that are entering the web industry now, clamoring to announce their startup at one of the launchpad conferences in front of their fellow geeks, my advice is to look at the scale of your audience. Many say that the best way to create an application or a website is to think about it in terms of if you were the target audience and user, but I don’t completely agree with that. If you’re a geek and you’re creating a company and you want traffic and revenues to soar, then your best bet isn’t to target one of the smallest audiences out there, aka, other geeks. TechCrunch does 160K+ pageviews per day and they’re essentially the loudest voice in the web industry, so scale that audience back and think how hard you have to work to win over even a small percentage point of those users if you’re targeting tech-savvy individuals.

On the other hand if you’re interested in a larger slice of the pie, try creating a service that gets out of the tech arena and brings some value to what the other 99.9% of web users are viewing daily. Not everyone knows what an RSS feed is, let alone Ajax, Ruby on Rails, “mashups”, or anything else you might be thinking as being interesting. Mainstream users shop online, view funny videos and stories, and keep their social networking profiles up-to-date. Keep that in mind next time you see a company built around the idea of mashing service X with utility Y, where X and Y have yet to be proven.

Being Unsexy In A Web 2.0 World

BusinessWeek had a great article about SixApart selling LiveJournal, and in the article they had a brilliant quote:

Six Apart isn’t a badly run company; it has just become unsexy amid newer Web 2.0 names.

This really sums up a lot of things I’ve been thinking about recently and is such a simple and perfect way to say it.

A problem I see in the tech industry, or in the startup field in general, is that companies only get talked about if they’re doing something new or innovative: blowing people’s hair back. Obviously in the tech world or in Silicon Valley, the “tech” part of the “tech business” is what is focused on, not the second half. Not revenues or marketing plans. Not their plans to branch out past the people who know what tagging is. Not how little debt they have. It’s all about the code, the flashy features, the innovative ideas, the talent working on those ideas, the look-and-feel. Everything that makes a company sexy, at least to the eyes of Valleyites. So in the BusinessWeek article, when SixApart was summed up as being “unsexy” I instantly thought it meant the following things:

• Not a lot of flashy or innovative features, at least not the kind that technophiles drool over.
• They make money and have a solid revenue plan.

So they’re unsexy… so what? I don’t think SixApart cares about their Alexa ranking or their trendiness anymore. They are a company with offices in multiple countries, with established businesspeople at the helm, and they’re focused on making money and pleasing customers. They’re not focused on being the talk of the tech circuit and getting a thousand virtual trackbacks. They’re not standing in the media spotlight like some people you know.

I think being unsexy is what startups should shoot for, because all being sexy does is get you writeups on all the blogs that nobody reads, and people signing up for your beta never to return. Being unsexy means you’re thinking about the “unsexy” parts of running a business, namely: making it a business through revenue and planning. If a site is making millions of dollars but looks bad, nobody will talk about it. Do you know how much money this guy makes?!?!? Nobody knew about him before he opened his mouth, but Marcus runs the site by himself, out of his apartment, and makes 5-6 figure AdSense revenues each day. His site’s not sexy but it brings in tons of cash and has a contented userbase. It won’t win any awards at these lame startup-Web-2.0 launchpad conferences, but it makes more money than all of them. 0 debt, tons of cash, and an unsexy interface. I’ll take it.

How Many People Could Digg Possibly Need?

Digg is a social voting site where all content is posted by users, then other users vote on their content and it rises to the top if it gets enough votes. These are all things you probably already know. But did you know that they have 35 employees and are looking to hire 6 more?

I just don’t see how that many people are necessary to run Digg. Here’s a team of people I’d expect to be necessary to run a site like Digg:

Designers

The site doesn’t have that many main areas: they have listing pages showing many articles, they have single article pages with comments, they have a posting page, and they have profiles which are just yanking info from a database (”SELECT * FROM digg_table WHERE user_posted_ID = $thisuser AND popular = 1″). That’s about it folks, it’s not like they’re maintaining a site with 25 different sections all with different page layouts for each one. It’s a very minimal design and only a few data views. What do they really need to “design” once the main site is up and running? They recently launched the new profile section but that’s the only new thing that needed to be designed in awhile. They could go with 3 designers and 1 creative director. By designer I mean someone who can put together mockups in Photoshop and also move them to XHTML/CSS with equal aplomb.

Developers

The magic in Digg is the algorithm that determines what articles are popular enough to make it to the front and upcoming sections on the site. No one really knows what combination of factors are necessary to get listed on the front page, we just know that if you get enough Diggs within a certain period of time, your post might show up on the homepage… or not. So once the architecture of the site is put together (as it was a few years ago) you’re not really creating new tables and UPDATEing databases much because the system is already built, you’re just going to want to add some new features from time to time. And at the speed Digg moves (where’s the pictures section fellas?) I can’t see Digg developers spending all their days coding, coding, coding since Digg launches new features like old people drive. Let’s say 3 developers, 1 senior developer, and they all report to the CTO. By developers I mean people who can code and create application architecture.

Server Administrators

With a site the size of Digg, you know they’re sitting on some serious hardware, especially when many sites they link to go down from their own traffic. Managing the runtime environment on the server, making sure processes aren’t spinning out of control, planning for scalability, organizing future expansion and purchases, these are all good things to have people working on. I’ll go with 3 server administrators, 2 senior architecture planners, and they also report to the CTO.

Ad Sales

Digg makes money, but not as much as it really could, mostly because geeks are known to not click on ads if their lives depended on it. People who can develop relationships with new advertisers and get them to sign on the line the line which is dotted is highly necessary. Maybe the Valley has warped people’s business brains but companies are normally run with their own profits so people who can manage accounts and sell ads is a must. Digg probably needs 4 ad salespeople and 1 ad sales manager. These are people who oversee an ad deal from the start of the relationship, through the sale, and onwards as they manage the account. Digg isn’t a gigantic site and no ad handoff is really needed, no additional staff needs to be in on the process.

Financial Staff

Well with ad sales and salaries you need people to handle the money for the company. I’ll say 2 accountants, and they report to the CFO.

Support Staff

Gotta have support staff to keep things running smoothly. Let’s include some community management skills into this grouping as well, you know, the bury brigade. 1 support staffperson, 3 community manager type people.

Totals

This list was really generous, Digg isn’t that deep of a site so some of these positions could be eliminated by hiring the right people. A good designer or a good developer can do the work of 2 or 3 lame designers or developers, so keep that in mind. The total including a CFO, a CTO, and then Kevin and Jay is 28 people working at Digg. Do they really need a whole design team since they update the design once in a millennium? No. Do they really need community managers if their designers, developers, and ad people could be managing the community as well as doing their normal jobs? Not particularly. I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and figure out exactly how in the hell Digg could have so many people on their staff and still want to hire more. I can’t see how Digg could possibly need that many people working for them, unless it’s to just spend their investment money and “look” like a bigger corporation. Hell if they got rid of 10 employees perhaps they’d be more profitable… just saying. Technorati just slimmed down so perhaps Digg should do the same.

Simple Web Button Tutorial Using Photoshop

Back in August of 2006 I wrote a simple tutorial for creating gradients in Photoshop, essentially the lifeblood *cough* of the Web 2.0 design trend. Its popularity since publishing and comment/trackback count is a testament to how many beginner-type tutorials are consumed online. To continue in the tradition of beginner web design tutorials, I now present to you a simple web button tutorial with my little spin on it.

Button Tutorials Are Everywhere

I think the “rendered” or “aqua-like” button tutorial is one of the biggest design memes on the web since there are hundreds or thousands of tutorials just like this one. Many of them cash in on the Mac OS X aqua look and show you how to make gummy-looking, candybar buttons, but this isn’t one of those tutorials. I personally find that look to be overdone but to each his own. The button style I teach here is more conservative and doesn’t take as long to produce, and I find it fits in better with the current minimalist and clean web aesthetic.

Step 1: Make Yourself A Circle

Take the Ellipse vector object tool (I currently have the color white in the foreground, so the ellipse is white) and create a small circle with it by holding down the Shift key to keep the ratios restrained.

Step 2: Turn It Into A Pill

At this stage I’ll convert the vector object into pixels by rasterizing it, which can be done by right-clicking on the layer in the Layers palette and selecting “Rasterize Layer”.

Once it’s rasterized, double click on the layer to bring up the Layer Style palette so we can give it an initial coloring. Go to the Color Overlay style and make it black for now so we can work with it easily.

So we have a black circle, fantastic. Zoom in close enough so that you can make out the individual pixels and choose the rectangular Marquee tool (marching ants if you’re old school). Select exactly half of the circle and move it a few pixels away from the other half so there’s a noticeable gap between the halves. Zoom back out to 100%.

These two semi-circles will be the end caps of the button, so move the selected cap out far enough to create space for the meat of the button. Zoom back in so that you can see some individual pixels and get your rectangular Marquee tool once more. Now, make a large rectangular selection in between the two button caps, the same height as either end. Fill this selection with black (same color as your Color Overlay style) so you now have a complete pill background with a solid color.

Step 3: Turn It Into A Button

Now that we’ve got ourselves a black button, go into Layer Styles again for your button layer and flip off the color overlay and turn on the gradient overlay style, then select that style so you can edit it. Click on the gradient so you can go to the Gradient Editor, and choose a solid-to-solid gradient style (not foreground to transparent or anything to transparent).

In the screenshot you can see the colors I picked, a medium grey and a light grey for the top of the button. At this point you’ve got a pretty simple button with a rendered look to it. We can go various places from here.

Step 4: Jazz It Up

You can leave it as is or you can modify some things, if you’d like to move further then keep following.

To make it stand off the page a bit more I hopped back into the Layer Style palette and added a Drop Shadow with the following characteristics: Black, 53% opacity, Multiply blend mode, 90° angle (straight down), 1px distance, 13% spread, 4px size. After this, I added an Inner Shadow with the following: White, 65% opacity, Normal blend mode, 90° angle, 2px distance, 0% choke, 0px size. The combination of the drop and inner shadows mimic what a real button would look like in 3D space if there was a lighting source above it. In standard user interface conventions, most objects on your screen are designed to appear as if there is a light source at the top left corner of your screen, casting light downwards, and shadows are a way of tricking your eye into believing 2D objects have depth and volume.

I’ve shortened the button and added some text to make it more button-like.

Now a second effect I like to use is a little strange in its execution but definitely gets the job done.

I will go back into my Layer Style and turn off the Drop Shadow and Inner Shadow that I just applied, and instead, I’ll add a 3px white stroke to the outside of the object. This won’t be visible unless you have a background color other than white, so it helps to do it with a visible color first and then switch to white so you can gauge the width of the stroke.

Now hop out of Layer Styles and duplicate your button layer. Once you have the duplicate, make the original layer invisible, then right-click on the duplicate layer you just created and select “Group Into New Smart Object” (CS2 and CS3, not sure how this is handled in other versions). Once you do this, right-click on the layer again and Rasterize it. These two steps take the layer effects you’ve applied as well as the actual pixels and flatten them together, so now we can apply new effects to this rasterized layer which makes it possible to apply new effects to ones you’ve already used.

Double-click on your newly-rasterized layer to bring up the Layer Effects palette, and apply a Stroke: 4px, outside position, normal blend mode, black, with 8% opacity. Hey it stroked the white stroke we had!

Okay, now duplicate the layer you were just working with (the duplicate of the original, so you’ll now have two duplicates) and make sure this new layer sits on top of the other layers of the button. Go into the Layer Style of this new duplicate and view your Stroke style that is a duplicate of your other layer. The light grey stroke you added previously is 4px so you have 4px of space between your white stroke and the end of your grey stroke to play around with. Modify your stroke style: 1px, outside position, 27% opacity, normal blend mode. Now change the Fill Type from Color to Gradient and select a color-to-transparent gradient type with the the color being black. Angle is 90° and the scale is 70%. This should give you a little shadow-type style underneath your button, above the light grey stroke of the previous layer making it look a little more beveled.

Conclusion

This is just one way of making a button, in fact this is just one way that I make a button, and there are countless more ways. Personally I like to round the corners of my buttons with 1600% zoom hand-dithering but that’s a little time consuming unless you do it all day long, so using the ellipse tool is a shortcut. Another shortcut is to feather the radius of a marquee selection. There are lots of ways to create the initial button, but once you’ve got that base shape then the rest is just applying various Layer Styles in different sequences. Good luck!