A pox on the House of MA17

The result of having a job previously held by MA17 is that I will periodically curse his name and unborn children as I bang my head on my desk in frustration. The reason for this is twofold. Sometimes I am bored. On other occasions, though, I will find myself in a "slack hole": A problem resulting from MA17 being a filthy, filthy slacker.

Today's quest was to create a new button for the homepage which was a longer version of the blue/yellow mouseover button we currently use:


The problem is that, for some reason, the format of these button images is not consistent:


As you can see from the image the yellow button results from applying a Bevel and Emboss effect to a yellow shape on a layer. The blue button, however, results from nothing. It has always and will always exist as an already complete image. There is no process by which that blue button can be created; it merely is.

So creating longer versions of these buttons is a partially simple task:



To make longer yellow buttons one need only apply the same Bevel and Emboss effect to a new layer. This is simple enough. Blue button construction, however, requires that one physically construct a new blue button from the body of the old; rending the poor blue button to pieces so that one might duplicate and reassemble those pieces into a new whole.

Granted, the blue-button-rending-and-reassembly process is not terribly difficult in and of itself. The difficulty is in trying to figure out why the two buttons were created in such a fundamentally different manner.