[reaven]

Yes, at least for the themes I'm working on - the icons will be part of the theme so you don't have to manually replace anything.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback on my latest effort; I'm still plugging away at creating replacement icons for home 1 and 2 and have started looking into altering studio flags as well. I hope to batch process them so they'll match the stencil look of the home icons. The other flags were easy enough to do by hand but damn there's a lot of studios.

this way is better you dont have to manually change/choose the home icons when you change themes !

[sonic00]

Yes, at least for the themes I'm working on - the icons will be part of the theme so you don't have to manually replace anything.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback on my latest effort; I'm still plugging away at creating replacement icons for home 1 and 2 and have started looking into altering studio flags as well. I hope to batch process them so they'll match the stencil look of the home icons. The other flags were easy enough to do by hand but damn there's a lot of studios.

Can you give a guess when you are finished with this theme - cause I can't wait to use it

[Juanflaco]

Can you give a guess when you are finished with this theme - cause I can't wait to use it

It'll have to be finished tomorrow night as I have some family stuff starting Saturday which will keep me occupied for a while.

[sandman4sure]

It'll have to be finished tomorrow night as I have some family stuff starting Saturday which will keep me occupied for a while.

Wonderfull! That theme looks really good. Can't wait to try it out!

[Juanflaco]

Ok, here's another one to play around with. As always, big thanks to Hitcher for the inspiration and a great skin to work with, and the other helpful folks around here who helped me figure things out along the way.

Stencil













This one has replacement icons for Home 1 & 2 (and backdrops for Home 3) and a few other modified graphics, but I've left the flags alone for now.

Download the zip here and extract to your Alaska folder. This will merge Stencil.xpr into your media folder and Stencil.xml into your colors folder. Then select the Stencil theme from Settings > Appearance > Skin and the colors will automatically load along with the new icons and graphics.

I tried to make everything clean and readable with fanart enabled, but do let me know if you have any suggestions or notice any missing items, etc.

Enjoy!

edit: updated zip with fix for transparent panels which looked weird when stacked.

[George]

That's a nice one, Juanflaco. I just installed it and apart from the icons on my home 1 screen it works flawless. How do I get those fancy icons of yours?

[grey]

superb theme, Juanflaco!

[sandman4sure]

That theme is wonderful! Thanks for sharing it Juanflaco!

btw: do you have some sort of Photoshop Action for making the Home Style 1 icons?
I would love to make some of my own of movies I have in my collection.

Thanks again!

[Amra]

Quick question about Blue Mosaic - and I apologize if I am just completely missing the boat on this one.

I finally got to updating my XBMC from Beta 2 to RC1 and subsequently updated Alaska - Now using the Blue Mosaic theme, the OSD seems to be very difficult to read - text is very light... if you were watching something wider than 16x9 then it would not be an issue, but if it is full screen it makes it extremely difficult to see.

Question is... Is this how it is supposed to be? My concern may be that I am not using a nightly build as it seems that xbmclive isn't updated nightly like others, and this is a side effect of not having the most up to date version.

I did that theme originally & it probably just needs some tweaking. I'll take a look at it over the weekend & see what I can come up with.

[gekados]

Ok, here's another one to play around with. As always, big thanks to Hitcher for the inspiration and a great skin to work with, and the other helpful folks around here who helped me figure things out along the way.

Stencil

This one has replacement icons for Home 1 & 2 (and backdrops for Home 3) and a few other modified graphics, but I've left the flags alone for now.

Download the zip here and extract to your Alaska folder. This will merge Stencil.xpr into your media folder and Stencil.xml into your colors folder. Then select the Stencil theme from Settings > Appearance > Skin and the colors will automatically load along with the new icons and graphics.

I tried to make everything clean and readable with fanart enabled, but do let me know if you have any suggestions or notice any missing items, etc.

Enjoy!

Very nice theme, testing it right now. Only one thing I need to change in it, that is the dark gray font in the OSD which I find a bit hard to see. Otherwise, very very nice.

[Juanflaco]

That's a nice one, Juanflaco. I just installed it and apart from the icons on my home 1 screen it works flawless. How do I get those fancy icons of yours?

Did you perhaps set up custom background files or folders for Home 1? If so, I think you'll need to reset them to default in order to see the theme backgrounds. Let me know if that works for you.

@gekados: Yeah, the OSD title is pretty dark, but I settled at a point I like based on my lighting conditions. Once you've made some changes which work for you, would you post a screenshot along with the lines you changed? I'm sure others will want to tweak that as well.

@sandman4sure: Although it's a fairly straightforward process, I don't have it scripted and there are a few manual decision points along the way. I'll briefly describe the process, and then so as to keep clutter out of this thread, anyone with questions can PM me. I'll be happy to elaborate.

Here's how I did the Home 2 icons. I use Gimp, so terminology may vary but you should have no trouble doing this in photoshop...

1. Start with a source image. For music I used the Klipsch RF-62s here; might be a good one to practice with. First resize your source so the pieces you want fit nicely on a 512 x 512 canvas.

2. Add an alpha channel if your image doesn't already have one.

3. Remove the background using wand or whatever selection tools are required. This needs to be done early as future steps depend on having the main image isolated against a transparent background.

4. Colors > Colorify to convert to greyscale.

5. Colors > threshold. This will convert your greyscale to large areas of black and white depending on how you adjust the two sliders.

6. Layer > Transparency > Color to Alpha. This will erase all the white areas of your image.

7. Splat it up! Use a variety of brushes to paint and erase until you get a distressed painted look.

8. Gaussian Blur, 2px by 2px to soften the edges a bit.

9. That's it, save your icon as a .png to maintain transparency and you can use them on Home 2. The home 1 icons are easy, I just pasted the home 2 icon over a concrete image and saved as a 640 x 360 .jpg

Again, I'm happy to get into more detail over PM if anyone has questions.

[scrolling]

Very nice theme

[Hitcher]

Are you using the latest Github build?

[hikaricore]

Very nice theme

Text is showing fine for me.

[Juanflaco]

Very nice theme

Yep, you'll need to grab a newer Alaska build from github. The flags have changed. The missing flags you've circled are now transparent so the background shows through, and the rating / year text will show up darker (same color as the other flags.)