Help on Making Visual Style

Hello Everyone,

I want to make visual styles and start on with skinning, is there any tutorial which i can read?

Also, which softwares are good to start making visual styles and application skins??

Do I need to be a programmer for that or does it requires any level of programming , as i am no good in that

thanks and regards

Faizi

You don't need to be a programmer for that , I suggest downloading stylebuilder for .msstyle or skin studio for windowblinds and you will also need a image editing program such as photoshop there is a tutorial that comes with those and your main tool could be hidden here

#285341

Willy beat me to it.

#285342

there are tutorials on deviantart

if you want to find them, search on google with keywords like

Stylebuilder

Visual Style

Windowblinds

etc

just get creative.. or if your just wanting to mod thats up to you ;P

#285434

Man I have to add that its not that easy finding information on Stylebuilder.

Its easy to take one image and manipulate it and put it back but the info that is needed for beginners like myself and others is what all the margines and default panel sizes do and all the rest, theres alot of numbers there that arent really well explained.

"The veteran visual stylist that finally writes an in depth tutorial on this will be considered a God!"

#330454

Man I have to add that its not that easy finding information on Stylebuilder.
Its easy to take one image and manipulate it and put it back but the info that is needed for beginners like myself and others is what all the margines and default panel sizes do and all the rest, theres alot of numbers there that arent really well explained.
"The veteran visual stylist that finally writes an in depth tutorial on this will be considered a God!"

I totally agree with you 100%. I've done a couple of ports myself and I can tell you the different properties of each control are a mess. Not only are many of them very non-descriptive, but you will find that you often change one property, only to find that nothing has changed upon testing because ANOTHER property (from god knows where) has higher priority and overrides whatever changes you did. All I can say is, get a very high-quality theme from one of the famous porters here and starting messing around with it. Basically, it's a "the more you do it the better you are" type of thing.

The one hint I can give you is to use one theme as a "base theme" for all your ports. The more you work with this base theme, the more familiar you are at what needs to be changed. That's because each different theme has different changes in the graphics names, what attributes are added/removed in each component, etc. In fact, you can probably start marking down which properties of this base theme changes aspects of the msstyles you see. For example, I use Susumu's Milk theme as base for all my ports and it has served me very well. I'm pretty familiar with working around that theme now...

#330658

JesterMania has got his point.

but i dont think it's that tough to deal with .msstyles files with stylebuilder. bcoz you can hardly find anything else. unless you can get a vs done in reshacker and a text-editor.

just spend some time study stylebuilder. not difficult as ppl say.

and tutorials will probably do nothing but waste your time.

try asking someone who have done a couple of excellent visualstyles when problems come up.

#331881