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So, you want to make your own Revenge skins, huh?





To make your own skin you need at most 8 seperate bitmaps. Most skin makers create 4, the toolbar, the background, and two status indicators, online and offline. The following chart shows the file names and appearance of the graphics on a messenger skin.





There are also two other graphics, busy_user and idle_user . However, these two images are used very infrequently, particularly idle_user (Seriously, who dials up their isp, boots up Yahoo! Messenger, then leaves?) Then again, if you don't make graphics for these, you may have to look at these lousy smileys again, ugh!



The Templates

The following messenger templates can simply be right-clicked off this page into your hard drive. They're gifs here, but when you make your own skin, you'll have to save your skin parts as bitmaps. To make a transparent background on status icons or the toolbar, paint the background the bright purple in the status icon template (red=255 green=0 blue=255) and save it as an 8-bit or 256 color bitmap. If you're like me and you prefer to sacrifice transparency for decent colors, just save it as a 24 bit bitmap.

Just like the downloaded skins, your new hand-made skin should be saved in C:/program files/Yahoo!/messenger/skins/your_own_filename



This is the template for friend_toolbar. Each square represents the space for you to put one of your toolbar graphics. the columns, from left to right are messages, add, info, and friends.
This is the template for online_user, offline_user, busy_user, idle_user, friend_root, friend_groupopen, and friend_groupclose. Yes, they are all the same size. I recommend you save these as 8-bit or 256 color bitmaps since 1. they're too small to have a lot of color anyway, and 2. it looks weird to have big purple squares all over your background
I know you can't see the template, but it's there. Actually, the length makes no difference, as long as your background is 240 pixels wide, you should have no problems. If your background tiles, even better, just forget the 240 pixels and save one tile only. When making a background, keep in mind that text has to show up on it. Try to limit background colors. A brightly colored, busy, rainbow background equals a pain in the butt when trying to make the names of your friends readable against it. If you want a lot of colors, adjust the brightness/contrast till it fades out enough to see black on. Otherwise, try to stick to one or two main colors. For example, use only red and yellow so that blue will show up easily on it.