tutorial • APRIL 17, 2001 • page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Complete, Home

Recreating Apple's Aqua Gel Effect with Xara X
Tools and techniques for transparency with gradients

by Gary Priester
Special to Digital Media Designer
garypriester@earthlink.net

[Editor's note: This is a Windows-only tutorial for Xara X, a vector illustration application from Xara Ltd. (Those of you with Macs can easily run Xara X via a Windows emulation program, such as Virtual PC from Connectix.) This tutorial focuses narrowly on one specific type of graphic, but, in the process, you get to learn some of the workings of the program—quite a few, actually, since this mammoth effort spans eight pages. If you're unfamiliar with Xara X or would simply like to follow along, you can download a fully functional, 30-day trial version of Xara X from http://www.xara.com/products/xarax. —D.N.]

Brendon Carr is responsible for this month's tutorial that has touched off a one-upspersonship contest in the Xara X Conference, one of dozens of graphics-related forums found at TalkGraphics.com.

It all began innocently enough when Brendon visited a tutorial posted on a web site called Wardspring.com. The tutorial (the result of which is the green button on the right) attempted to recreate the secret process used by the Apple design team to create the gel-like buttons featured in the new Macintosh OS X Aqua interface. Brendon posed the question how to replicate this effect in Xara X, not Photoshop, to the visitors to the Xara X Conference.

I instantly rose the the challenge and provided a simple six-step solution in Xara X. Immediately other members of the conference submitted their entries and enhancements and the race was on. In the end, I think the Xara conference participants not only replicated the aqua gel look, but surpassed it tenfold.

Xara's powerful tool set including its unique gradient transparency and new feathering tool (all this in a vector application), is what makes it so easy to recreate this effect.

Without getting into a long-winded discussion of Xara versus Illustrator or Photoshop, it is worth pointing out how Xara handles transparency, especially gradient transparency versus Adobe's method.

To apply gradient transparency in Illustrator or Photoshop, first a black and white gradient is created and then flat transparency applied as you can see in the top example. A rather rigid method.

Xara can apply gradient transparency directly to any bitmap, vector object, text object, in grayscale or full color. The object is selected, Linear (or other gradient transparency style chosen) and then the transparency is applied interactively by dragging the transparency fill path arrow on the selected object as you can see in the bottom illustration. This provides Xara's unique ability to create incredibly smooth, opaque to 100 percent transparency effects.

As I assume most of the readers at this site have not yet heard of Xara X, the killer vector application from England, I have tried to break it into tiny steps so non-Xara users and Macintosh users can get a good idea how it is done even without having Xara X installed.

If you don't have Xara X, Click Here to download a free, fully functional, 30-day trial copy. Xara X is a Windows-only product but runs efficiently on a Macintosh with a Windows emulator.

As always, we will be working in Pixels. If you have forgotten how to do this, open the Page Options dialog (right click on an empty portion of the screen and select Page Options or Utilities > Options). In the Units tabbed section, select Pixels from the drop down list, and set the Color Units: to 0-255.

In the Grid and Ruler tabbed section set the Major Spacing: to 100pix (key it in exactly like this with no spaces) and the Number of Subdivisions: to 10.

If you do not see your screen rulers, go to the Window pull down menu and select Bars > Rulers .

Enable Snap to Grid. (found in the Window pull down menu).

Select the Rectangle Tool on the main toolbar on the left of the screen.

Click and drag a rectangle that is 250 pixels wide by 150 pixels tall. Refer to the size on the context-sensitive Infobar at the top of the screen and do not release the mouse button until the rectangle is this exact size. The reason for this rigidity is we will be rounding the corners of the rectangle and in order for the corners to be perfectly round, the rectangle must be drawn to the exact size, and not resized which will result in non-round corners.

With the rectangle and the Rectangle Tool still selected, click the Curved Corners icon on the Infobar at the top of the screen (it's the inverted L- shaped button).

There are two methods to round corners in Xara. The first is to drag the outside control points on the corners with the Rectangle Tool cursor. The second is to select Curvature from the drop down list on the Infobar and click the right arrow button. In either case, we want a curvature setting of 0.7.

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Gary Priester's articles appear on Efuse.com, Designer.com, Unleash.com and Xaraxone.com as well as in Communication Arts Magazine. His monthly Web column/tutorial, "Logos for the Design Challenged," can be seen at Unleashed Productions. Priester is co-author with Dave Huss of CorelDRAW Studio Techniques (Osborne CorelPress) and the author of Looking Good in Color (Ventana Press). He can be reached at garypriester@earthlink.net. ©2001 Gary W. Priester Tutorials are for private use only. No text or images may be used or reproduced in any form (except as tutorials) without the express written permission of the author.
tutorials • 2001

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