Step 12: Creating the Meter – Polishing our indicator

Now we can make visible all our below layers and to pick up a nice color for our indicator. I´m going to use a very bright blue: #24fffc. This is just a matter of preferences and since we created vector shapes we can easily change their color in the future if we want to.

Now we´re going to scale our shapes down to make them fit inside our Dark Area using our “Light_Ambient” layer as the boundries of our transfotmation like so. Remember to hold down SHIFT and ALT keys while scaling

Now to get rid of the extra indicator at the bottom of our icon we can use 2 different techniques. We already saw how a Layer Mask can be very handy for that kind of visibility operations. However and since this two layers are pure vector shapes, we can take benefit of the tools provided by Photoshop to modify and transform shapes forms within Vector Layers. I´m going to show you this other technique.

First thing we need to do is to hide our “meter_shape02″ to have a cleaner vision of what we´re doing. Now we make sure our vector thumbnail from our “meter_shape01″ layer is selected (once again click on it and you will notice how the different contours of the vector content from layer are highlighted). Now we select the PEN TOOL by selecting it from the tools panel or by clicking the P KEY. Like we did when we substract the circle from our meter in the last step we need to set the PEN TOOL to that same behaviour and ensure that Shape Layers and not just Paths are selected as the default way the tool draw the objects.

Now, and once again using our guides and the boundries of our canvas as a reference we´re going to draw a triangle, starting from the center, then going to the bottom-left corner of our canvas, then to the bottom-right and finally by returning to the center of our guides like so:

Now, if you followed the instructions I provided for the degree rotation when creating our meter_shapes you will notice that there´s a little portion at the left-bottom and right-bottom parts of our indicator that aren´t totally hiden. You may consider that this could be a cool addition to the icon and you may want to leave it this way. However, for demonstration porpueses and going to get rid of those little squares too, just to show you how Direct Selection works inside Vector Layers composed by mutiple shapes.

So now, with our Vector Shapes still active we select our DIRECT SELECTION TOOL again (the white arrow) and we draw a nice selection of the bottom part of our triangle. This way we ensure we´re not selecting any other shape contained into the layer. Now we press CTRL/OPT+T to access the TRANSFORM TOOL and then by right-clicking we select the Scale option from the pop up menu.

Now we can transfrom its width by moving the horizontal sliders while holding the ALT KEY to force the transformation to start from the center or, as explained above, by setting around 105% the values for the width transformation in the TRANSFORM TOOL menu at the top of our window.

Now, depending on the rotation settings you used to create the “meter_shapes”, you may want or not to repeat this for the “meter_shape02″ layer. I think it looks just fine this way so I will leave “meter_shape02″ as it is but, again, it is up to you now you know the tecnique. Your icon should look like this:

Step 13: Creating the Icon – The Arrow Holder

Ok, now it is time to take care of the part that will hold our future arrow in the center of the icon. First we need to do is to select the ELIPSE TOOL and to set the Foreground Color to White – #FFFFFF. Now, and as usual, we´ll use our guides as a reference to draw a circle holding SHIFTand ALT keys while dragging from the center of our guides. Make it around 75px Wwide and high but this, of course, will depend if you´re creating a 512