What possessed me to choose the red for the baseball team buttons, I don't know!
I used PhotoBevel to put the scalloped sloped bevel on the button. The font is 1979. After laying the text down and merging the layers (two different point sizes, two seperate layers), I Control clicked the text layer to select, made another layer, and filled the selection with black using the paint bucket (this was before I learned about the "paint bucket in a backspace key" shortcut!). Then I nudged the black shadow with Ctrl+Arrow keys.
I felt that the Yearbook Damaged
font just seemed perfect for a football button! This button is as easy to make as it looks (bevel, type, and save!). However, I noticed that at 300 pixels, these guys were pretty wide (and this was before I even considered a frames type layout!), so I tried reducing the size. The results were very dissapointing as the text (especially the smaller sized type) was illegible! :( It could well have been the beginning of the end of the dream!
For Basketball, wood looked good. I had planned a wooden background for the page, but the file was too big, so I settled for wooden buttons. I used different fonts for the three leagues on the basketball page. This is Wide Glide for the NBA boys,
Busorama for the WNBA (BTW, I just grabbed Cleveland using explorer, it's nothing personal I have for Cleveland or against anybody else!), and...
and Garamond for the ABL.
For Hockey, I took some whites, greys, and blues and tried to create an icy look. I scratched in white using the pencil tool to give the illusion of skate tracks on the ice. The book that had the URL's of the sports teams used a "destroyed typewriter face" style font for the teams. Was that what moved me to do the hockey buttons this way? Dunno!
Here's a league divider for the basketball page. The background was made by some diagonal doodling with paintbrushes and airbushing on a black background, which was later worked over with a Motion Blur. This was the pattern I used initially in all my page headers and separators like...
this header for Boxing links on my Fighting page. I spun a beveled square onto a corner, then cut away the top and bottom using elliptical selections, and beveled again (I told you PhotoBevel was awesome!!!). So now I have a wicked bowtie thingy that looks like something I could order from a Kung-Fu magazine (20 years ago, that is!). Why the bathtub tile background here and....
here? Because of the rich color gradients, there was only one format I could use to make this look decent: JPG. And you know, you can't get transparency with JPG. Why is this important? You'll see in page 2!
The end of the "button for every team" dream came when common sense came a calling. While it works OK on your system, just imagine hooking up to a page chock full of buttons through a 14.4 modem (which is how a lot of the world will see your pages!)! :( Think the world's gonna sit by and watch those big buttons load? HA! Check out the stats on what I used here!
Then there was another size problem. The baseball header is ok just sitting by itself, even at 640x480 resolution. But when I developed a Navigation bar with a frames layout, it was suddenly way too big. So now the dream was dead, the pattern theme was also dead and so I was faced with a redesign task. So let's push onward, shall we?