I am trying to create a blog header image according to my idea. I searched for black and white images of books, thinker of rodin and chess in http://www.google.at. At first I wanted to add big-lettered single words for "read", "think", "learn" overlapping the image of books, thinker and chess respectively. But when I searched for ways to make text transparent or a similar effect, I found a page explaining how to create image that is outlined by text: http://www.drweb.de/photoshop/bild-aus-schrift.shtml

I decided to go for that and made a few versions of the header image, with gaps between the 3 parts and without, with more or less transparency and so on. Lacking experience as designer and as well as the tool I used (Adobe Photoshop CS 3) I finally took the image I liked best so far.

It has a special property to make it suitable for different layouts: There is no 100% background color, only a 50% white fill layer. So by setting the background-color css style for the image, you can basically give the image a slight hue in a color matching your layout. In my case, its the layout.titlecolor.

Download link for zipped header-image project: /9756179/getfile?name=header-image_read-think-learn

Like me you might have recognized that editing the default site skin 'Main page of a single day' does not have an effect. This seems to be a problem of antville.org default layout. The link in the site skin list refers to skin 'day.main' while the id is in fact 'Day.main'. So if you want to edit the skin, simple select 'Main page of a single day' and change 'key=day.main' to 'key=Day.main' in the browser url.

I try to add icons to my layout for action-links, menu-items, etc.
Resource:
http://www.freeiconsweb.com/