Badges and Bows: Beyond the Buttons
Page badges and application icons are the two- or three-dimensional graphical shapes that are used to attract attention, convey simple messages, or visually represent an application. They can be used to note that an application is still beta, to indicate that a sale is ongoing, to highlight the date of an event, or even just to add a pretty effect to web pages.

Figure 5-13. Shiny, wet button created with Photoshop CS3
The main difference between a badge and an application icon is that the badge is not meant to look like something that can be clicked. An application icon, on the other hand, can look clickable.
Where the icon differs from a button is that the icon is usually graphical, with no text, whereas buttons have text describing what happens when you push the button. Buttons also have distinctive button-like shapes, whereas icons can be any shape, though square is the most popular. With icons, the graphics represent the action (open the application, save to file, and so on).
In this section, I focus on badges. Later, in the section on reverse-engineering designs, we'll look at some icons.
Tip
In this section and the next, I'm switching to Photoshop for the examples. Note that when creating a shape such as a rectangle with Photoshop, you'll need to "rasterize" it before you can apply most of the modifications I'll cover. This is because the image ...