While the name connotes spookiness, ghost buttons as a design practice are anything but. This design trend that has been gaining stream since last year is a cool way to feature CTA buttons that you can easily feature on your landing page builder of your website.
Due to how web developers and designers gravitate toward minimalism as part of their design practice, ghost buttons easily fit the bill. We have featured before examples of how ghost buttons are best used on a web page that strike the balance between minimalist design and usability.
Now, let’s look into how this design technique is made by looking deeper into some of the best ghost button resources.
Trends 2014: The Rise of the Ghost Button
Simone Sala at SitePoint
‘Ghost buttons’ are those transparent and empty buttons that have a basic shape form, such as a rectangular or perhaps squared. They are generally bordered by a very thin line, while the internal section consists of plain text printed in a light, sans-serif font. (Click to Tweet This Quote!)
The article is a great primer for people who are not familiar with ghost buttons and wish to learn how this design practice works. It provides a brief background on the origins of ghost buttons and features real-life examples of how ghost buttons are best implemented on web pages.
More importantly, the piece details the pros and cons of this button design. Given that ghost buttons came to prominence as a current design trend, there might be a tendency of non-designer website owner to overuse ghost buttons on their web pages. By taking note of ghost buttons’ advantages and disadvantage, hopefully people will become more aware of its limitations and learn how and when this design element should be applied.
How to Create CSS Ghost Buttons
By Jacob Gube at Six Revisions
The ghost button design trend is currently quite popular. As you’ve seen, it’s easy to create ghost buttons using CSS. (Click Here to Tweet This Quote!)
This post pretty much covers the basics of designing your ghost buttons using CSS. It discusses the different variations of ghost buttons in the post:
- Basic ghost button
- Rounded corners
- Simple transition effect
- Thick border
- Semi-transparent fade
- Border color fade
- Full color fade
- Size transition effect
Referring to this post should give you all the things you need to do in order to design the best and most appropriate ghost button for your page.
Ghost Buttons – THE Minimalist Web Design Trend
Denis Potschien at noupe.com
Ghost buttons can be really impressive if applied correctly. The examples show that a good background is vital and animation effects give them an individual note. The more basic the design is, the more concise it must be. This is the only way to stand out from the mass and not get drowned in the crowd. (Click Here to Tweet This Quote!)
Emphasizing on ghost button’s design qualities, this post helps you better understand how to create this button type. It identifies simple yet overlooked ideas on how to approach your ghost button design.
25 Awe-Inspiring Websites Using Ghost Buttons
by Nancy Young at Web Design Ledger
These kind of buttons are called ‘ghost’ due to their transparent nature. They’re transparent as ghosts, at the same time they grab users’ gaze at once and do not overload design. You may find ghost buttons on a wide variety of sites. The best ghost buttons look on websites with large-scale background, and flat, minimalist design. (Click Here to Tweet This Quote!)
We featured websites with well-designed ghost buttons at their CTA buttons in this post. To add to the ones in the post, this design inspiration post from Web Designer Ledger provides you better ideas on how you can design ghost buttons for specific pages in your site or blog.
Final thoughts: Ghost buttons add texture and dimension to your web design, especially if you apply flat and minimalist design to your website or blog. However, not all design trends are applicable to your site – ghost buttons included. It depends on a number of factors to determine the kinds of design elements that fit to your overall design.
Therefore, reading up the resources above will not only help you create the best ghost buttons possible, but they also will help you figure out whether your site should be using this design trend in the first place.
