After getting the basics of web design down you’ll want to improve on your design skills and the pen tool will come into a lot of it. You can create any curve you can think of with the pen tool and I’ll show you in this tutorial how to create some pen style tabs(Navigation buttons).

Step 1
Firstly create a new document and fill the background with a light color and select the pen tool .You’ll also need to check your pen settings, once selected they are located below the ‘File’, ‘Edit’ and ‘Image’ tabs.

Step 2

Now you must start to use the pen tool and be warned at first it can be extremely stressful and you’ll want to just give up, but it’ll be worth it. In order to keep the line straight hold shift and click where you want it to start and then click where you want it to end, this will be a straight line.

Step 3

Next you want it to take more of a shape, whatever your foreground color is your tab will be. Next hold shift and click where you want your tab to end(In height).

Step 4

Creating where the curve begins and ends is the stressful part once you understand the very basics of the pen tool. You don’t want to hold shift here. Clicking slightly lower than where you curve will start is how we do this.

Step 5

Here we have to click slightly lower again but hold the click and drag it around a little to see how smooth you can make your curve. This can take some fiddling around with to perfect it.

Step 6
Now we should actually make this into a sub navigation, in this tutorial you should have learned how to use the pen tool at the very basic level. Now we’ll add some extra effects & Blending options to improve the overall presentation.

Hopefully this has helped you in understanding how to create buttons like this because I’ve not come across a tutorial which could teach it.

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