While it’s best to avoid, sometimes it you must duplicate the appearance of UIToolbar items. Unfortunately, UIKit doesn’t appear to provide any means for achieving the etched look that it adds on each item it has control over so, for custom UIBarButtonItems you must do it manually.

In my case, I needed to present some information on the toolbar, but needed it to be non-interactive, have a special layout, and use some existing vector images. To that end, here are some category methods that made it straight forward: [https://gist.github.com/2465637](https://gist.github.com/2465637).

Given that, etching can be had with a few lines. It’s not efficient, but it is easy.

[[[[UIImage ct_imageWithPDFNamed:@"time" size:CGSizeMake(26, 26)]
  ct_imageWithOverlayColor:[UIColor colorWithRed:112/255. green:119/255. blue:123/255. alpha:1]]
  ct_imageWithInnerShadowOffset:CGSizeMake(0, 1) color:[UIColor colorWithWhite:0 alpha:.6]]
  ct_imageWithShadowOffset:CGSizeMake(0, 1) blur:0 color:[UIColor colorWithWhite:1 alpha:.6]]