: What do you call the model for creating buttons for a web application? I am looking for the graphic design terminology for describing themed buttons used in a web application. The way I understand

@Sue6373160

There's a method of making a generic button image consisting of a solid color (being the specular or highlight color) with an alpha channel controlling the buttons 3d contouring.

This allows the designer to control the color of the button by its (or its containing element's) CSS background-color property. This allows easy theme changes without resaving all bitmaps with the new background color.

It also allows one bitmap to be downloaded for sites with multicolored buttons or button states.

Unfortunately I don't know what it's called.

Here's a simulation in Photoshop:

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@Turnbaugh909

I'm not sure what you mean by "model", but usually buttons are created as part of a UI library. As part of the process, designers choose a particular visual style for clickable components such as buttons. This includes button shape (rectangles, rounded rectangles, pill-shaped, etc.), border style, whether to make it 3D with a bevel/drop shadow/gloss/etc., whether to give it texture, what font to use, how the different button states (normal/hover/depressed/active/disabled) look, as well as the color scheme of the UI.

There are pre-made UI libraries/themes out there, and sometimes designers will modify button templates, but with something as simple as a button, you typically just create them from scratch. And even if it's a more elaborate UI theme, you still need the buttons to match the rest of the UI components, so you'd probably create them from scratch anyways.

You may be thinking of pre-made buttons that you can download the images/CSS/JS for. Some people who aren't graphic designers or aren't good with CSS find them useful. You can find many of these by googling "CSS buttons" or "CSS3 buttons". Some of them can be easily customized for different colors/backgrounds/shapes.

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