How to create theme's

Hello ibooze,
Nice question, hard to answer.
There's one prime directive: look how others solved your problem! That's the best way to learn quite little tricks.
The beginning:
You wants to create a theme for the PAM 1.1 (Beta4):
The size of your project is 406x573. Ok? No way for other sizes.
You must get an overview where all buttons and regions are. So you have to take some screenshots of PAM. The target is to make a blank sheet with colored boxes for each element. It's your choice how accurate it must be. If you wants to make them very detailed, you need a box for every icon. Now have a look: there's no great pixelspace left... Hmmm.
At the left side, you need a light color, because the application list has a black font color. At right, you need a darker color for the white folder list.
If you use pictures it's necessary you could read it further more! It's not usefull for other people to use your theme but they couln't see the handling of the menu!
Furthermore you need clean fields for the logo and the personal picture. So you can only use round rectangles with a small radius.
Which area do you like to make transparent? There are 2 files to make: the background.jpg and the background-top.bmp. The 2nd one don't need a high of 573, just a high from top to your last tranparent element. It was displayed over the jpg! So all graphic unter the bmp isn't visible. If you want to have transparent areas at the bottom, it's only necessary to create a background-top.bmp and leave the jpg white with maximal compression.
The transparent areas are all pixel with pure magenta, the magic color (255/0/255) in the bmp-file.
The 3rd file is the slider. It is stretched. So theres a room for your creativity in 13 pix vertical
Don't forget to test your theme with other languages. You might think there was so many space to use right because "Help" ist a small word. Then you never selected "Czech"...
Ok, that are some things about theming for PAM. If you think theming for PAM-Mod is quite easier, forget it. You've got more space for graphic, font-colors etc, but you have also to arrange them. That's something we do next week.
Hope to posted helpful lines,
MrElchbau