View examples of the finished version of this tutorial at the Omega Designs home page, here.
This tutorial will show you how to make the basic interface objects as seen on the Omega Designs. You'll obviously have to make different sized ones for different situations.
1: Start off with either a blank canvas or the downloadable design overlay PSD file. This downloadable file will let you complete this tutorial whilst effectively previewing it in a web browser - see the Overlay Download page for more information. For this tutorial, I am going to use a 400x400 blank canvas. Set your primary colour to #F5F5F5 or a similar very light grey. Select the polygon tool and make a six sided polygon in the top left area of where you want your shape. Hold shift while soing this to make it snap to various angles, and have it orientated so that one side is flat along the bottom, as seen in the example. Duplicate this layer and put the second hexagon in the bottom right corner of your shape (see example). Now use the rectangle tool to turn this into one 6 sided grey polygon with sloping corners in the top left and right (again, see the diagram).
2: Now merge all the layers you have used to create your shape by linking them and pressing ctrl/cmd + E. Make sure you don't merge the background layer too. Now go Layer || Layer Style || Stroke and set the stroke settings to 1px width and the colour to #D1D1D1 (or similar). Leave the rest of the settings set to default. Create a new layer by pressing ctrl/cmd + shit + N. Now select a large brush, and set it to full white - opacity and flow don't matter too much, full is fine. Apply to the centre of the shape without going too close to the edges - see the example image.
3: Now use the gaussian blur filter: go Filter || Blur || Gaussian Blur and enter a value of about 8, depending on the size of your image. The font I use for OD and PSG is called Alexis, a free font that you can find on sites such as www.acidfonts.com with the colour set to #666666. For more examples of this interface, look around the site or go to our sister site, www.omegadesigns.co.uk.
Taking the effect further
Now you've got your basic shape, you can resize this and cut it up as necessary. You'll need to use selection and crop tools here. Hide/remove the text layer and drag a marquee around the whole shape and press ctrl/cmd + shift + C to copy all layers. Press ctrl/cmd + V to paste the shape as a new layer, and then ctrl/cmd + T to transform this shape as necessary. These components can then be arranged into a full interface with a little time and effort.
