Thread: Thinking of Theme Making? You Can Do It!

Hello BBOS,

I just wanted to take a moment to give some words of encouragement to anyone who is thinking of taking the plunge into creating their own themes. It does take a significant amount of time at the begining, however once you get the hang of it, it takes less and less. I competed my very first theme on 4/5/09, so right around 3 months ago. Since then I have completed around 10 unique themes and around 30 variations of those originals.

I can't speak for all theme makers but for me and many others its addicting and really, really fun.

Here are the steps I took to get going:
1. Download Plazmic theme builder here: Plazmic Content Developer's Kit v4.7 for BlackBerry (its a pretty hefty file so it takes some time to download)
2. Your also going to need a image editing program. If your familiar with photoshop it works great. I use a fee program called gimp that you can get here Gimp.
3. I would recommend finding some basic icons by searching online. You can find many free ones just make sure the ones you use are open license. Keep in mind you can use your image editor to make you own as well.
4. I started by making a basic Zen theme to get use to the functions of plazmic. This helped me a lot to get use to the lay out etc.
5. From there move into the custom option. There you have many more options to play around with.
6. Don't get frustrated. There are areas that if its not done right, it may not look as good as it could (i.e. Icon size)
7. Ask questions, there is no need to re invent the wheel. Feel free to PM me or post any questions you have. Myself and many others are here to pitch in and help.
8. Move into creating animations and SVG files. This is a bit more advanced and where you create docks and animations.

I hope this gives a few people that were hesitant to start theme building to finally say "yes I will do it!"

Let's see your creativity and Enjoy!

rellims, thank you so much!! im sure this will be very encouraging to anyone considering theme making... me included, i might take a plunge and try it so you might be hearing from me with questions

Wow very impressive. Thanks for taking time to very clearly delineate how one can make themes. I don't think I have seen someone make a short and sweet list like that. Too kind rellims. A big thanks and happy 4th to you my friend.

Nice Rellims. This will help a lot of people.

Thanks Rellims :fing02: I will show this to my wife and see if it helps her out. Nate was too busy to help her :nutkick:

Originally Posted by Bryan

Thanks Rellims :fing02: I will show this to my wife and see if it helps her out. Nate was too busy to help her :nutkick:

:bsflag:Yeah right. i asked you to send me the revised version. Never heard from you again about it!

I didn't bother the revised version didn't work either :lmao:

Originally Posted by Bryan

I didn't bother the revised version didn't work either :lmao:

I don't understand why it won't work. Is she sure she has the App icon font set to default? You can't change the font, size or color.