Introduction

About this document

This tutorial should explain to newbies some aspects of creating Aston Shell Themes.
Note, that this document is written for people, who already have some experience in skinning and work with graphical applications, so if you're a complete newbie, you'll probably have to look for some graphics tutorials first.

You can surely start making decent Themes without even reading the tutorial (as Aston GUI lets you do this quite easily) but this won't be wiser than driving a car without even being aware of highway code. So, at least give this document a try...

The tutorial was originally started by Taras Brizitsky aka SacRat, a member of A.R.T. group. Some additional information was added with the help of Nikita Eugenov aka Smanic/A.R.T. and later slightly reformatted by Nerio. The original SkinWiki version has been started by Rich Kulesus aka mrbiotech.

The current version of the tutorial is mostly written/maintained by SacRat.

Although all the rights to the original version of this document belong to SacRat and early contributors, the updated tutorial you're reading now is distributed under the terms of FDL/CC BY-NC-SA and is meant to replace SacRat's original work and become the official skinning tutorial for Aston. If you're unfamiliar with these licenses you can find links to them at the very beginning of the document. The licenses are very unrestrictive and give you a lot of freedom to modify and redistribute this work. If you feel experienced enough you can easily update this tutorial on SkinWiki.

Note: this tutorial completely reflects the process of Aston 1.9.2 skinning.

And, finally... Don't think this tutorial to be your theming Bible: it only contains general information and during your work you'll need other sources as well. We've removed all the redundant information in order to make it easier to read.

Graphics tutorials

If you need any Photoshop tutorials to help you to improve your graphics creation skills, here's the "first aid" list:

Some of these sites can be useful even if you're an experienced Photoshop user.

Note: Basically you can start making Aston Themes using whatever graphics editor you're familiar with, even MS Paint.

Artists to learn from

There're many Themes for Aston, but not all of them are innovative and fresh.
Make sure to check "featured" Themes on the site first if you need to learn some tricks or dig for ideas. Also check works after the following artists (in no order):

Basic Theme

The simplest Aston Theme consists of the following elements:

Note: this is the absolute minimum of what you should make in order to have a very basic Theme for Aston.

If you want to make a complete Theme, you should also include the following elements:

A few definitions

Just don't forget about it and the rest will be much easier :)