This is an addition to the Happy Birthday Community project. In the last Community Project, I was fortunate enough to have theAVMAN take the images I would make and apply them in SkinStudio to make the Troll Thumping Day Windowblinds.

Since I have yet to complete a Windowblind, I thought I would see how far I could get with just some help from all you experts out there. I’m not asking for anyone to ‘put it together’ but to just follow this thread and offer tips, advice, or just tell me ‘how to do this or that’, but I’ll do the work.

For anyone else who is interested, I will post all the image files, as I go along, in the Graphics Gallery incase you want to download them and play along.

So, here we go.

What I will be using for this tutorial is

~Image Shack for thumbnails

~Screenhunter 5 Free for full and partial screencaptures. A great little FREE screencapture tool.

~Photoshop for the Graphics

~Skinstudio6 for the blind *the AVMAN recomended Skinstudio5, but I really want to learn 6 since it is supposed to be so much easier. Nuthin' personal, dude.

You can also follow my frustration on Twitter if you use it.(PoSmedley)

This is my first draft. Right now, I am focusing on the start panel and taskbar.



Here is what I have for the taskbar, start button and Button.



Now, as you might see, this isn't what might be called the normal taskbar. I don't know what the technical term for this style would be (floating?) but I like calling it the pain in the ass style, because I can't get it to work.

The problem is with the 'blank' space above the taskbar. My Start Button and Buttons are larger in Height. Though the whole thing looks pretty in the Skinstudio preview, when applied..well, it looks like someone stepped on everything.

the AVMAN has been kind enough to assist me in fixing this.

"Po you are going to have to leave the same # of pixels of empty space above the taskbar as your balloon button are.

Ex,.... taskbar button height is 50 then if the bar itself is 30(default)them there should be 20 blank space above the bar.

Dont forget also the content margin in the taskbar buttons sets overall height of the bar!!!!!!!"

theAVMAN'S reference image...



Now, because I am also a clutz with posting Articles (I am trying to follow Frogboy's Article on Writing effective articles in HTML at the same time), I'm gonna stop here. You see, I hit post before I had formatted it and some of you may be looking at a mess of html as I am editing this right now. What I'm going to do is package up the graphics I have made for the taskbar and upload them and we'll pick up from there once they are available.