Calvin’s Hub

If you don’t know what “Aqua Spheres” are, it’s the shiny sphere with the translucent effect at the bottom popularized by Apple once again. The Aqua effect was first seen on the Mac OS buttons. If you add the effect on a shiny sphere then you’d get Aqua Sphere just like the sphere (without the lines on the surface) on the iDisk icon.

Most of the tutorials you would see in Google for this effect is for Photoshop so here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it in Macromedia Fireworks.

1. First create your circle. I would suggest using a dark color like #003300.

2. Then create a small white ellipse and place it just near the top part of the circle.

3. Change the fill into a Linear Gradient with one end being white and the other end the same color as your circle.

4. You may have to rotate and adjust the gradient controller to create the shiny effect in your sphere.

5. Now to create the Aqua effect, make another ellipse like the first one but this time, choose a lighter version of the color of your circle. I used #66CC33. Place this near the bottom part of your circle.

6. Now change its Edge to Feather with a value of 61 (you can play around with this value).

7. Almost done. To make it more classy, let’s add a shadow. Create another small but wider ellipse and place it at the feet of the circle behind it. Change its color to gray (#333333).

8. Then simply change its Edge to Feather with a value of 30. (Again, you can play around with this value)

There you go! Your Aqua Sphere is finished. Now what can you do with it? Make an icon of course and put it in your site. I placed a webding on it to create some sort of a bus icon.

You might also be interested in:

• Creating a Web 2.0 Glossy Text Effect in Fireworks
• Creating the “reflection” effect in Fireworks
• Creating shiny web 2.0 buttons with Fireworks
• Creating an iPhone App style icon in Fireworks

Filed under: Fireworks Tutorials