What it take to be at least half decent at it? I look around at these forums and see amazing skins and graphics and I wonder how I could join the ranks of these awesome coders. I know that learning HTML and graphics isn't easy, but could you give me some advice that could help? How long am I going to be studying Flash and Javascript before I can do anything to make my forums look slightly good.

Forget Flash and Javascript. What you want to learn is CSS and HTML. CSS is what you need to learn to make a nice skin on your own. It takes a while to really wrap your brain around it, but once you get it, it's easy as pie.

What I did to start learning CSS was to look at other people's CSS. Read it. It may seem meaningless at first, but you'll still remember things you keep seeing, and it will make a lot more sense later on and you'll have a moment where the lightbulb goes off and you're like "OH! That's what that was for!".

I also, more importantly, played with the AIO Skin Generator on IFSZ (just Google it, it's not hard to find). Play with it, going through each line of code, figuring out what changes what. Once you've got that memorized, you're really half way there.

Making a good skin, though, requires knowing how to not only modify the basics, but pushing it further. So don't just grab an AIO skin and say "okay, that looks decent!". Instead, take it, look at, and rewrite the whole thing by hand. It helps things sink in. Don't just mindlessly copy, but look at what you're adding as you do it. Think to yourself, "can I take some padding out of here?" or "what would it look like if I make the border thicker?" etc. That's how you get to go from being a "good" skinner to a "great" skinner.

I does take time. And work. And, yes, you need to have some artistic forethought as well, but deep down it's just code, and really not even hard code, to be honest. If you use Firefox I recommend the extensions "Firebug" and "CSS Viewer", they make the journey a lot easier. If you don't use Firefox, I recommend dumping whatever browser you're using and using Firefox. ( :p )

You could use Javascript to make your own add-ons, but... honestly, there are a billion Javascript codes already available for Invisionfree things, and the majority of them are fairly useless and only slow the page loading down. Grab a pretty legend and you're set as far as Javascript goes, in my opinion.

HTML on the other hand is a great thing to know if you want your sidebar to look nice. There are tons of HTML tutorials on the web... Again, just hit Google up for that. I found HTML rather simple, and it didn't take me too long to learn, especially since I was already fairly familiar with CSS by the time I looked into really learning HTML.

As far as learning graphics... You really just have to roll up your sleeves and give it a shot. Read tutorials, too. Red Carpet & Rebellion has some easy-to-follow ones that I recommend. Remember that if you want to make good graphics, you have to start out with good photos. I think, for some reason, a lot of beginners fail to realize this and use blurry/pixelized pictures, and their graphics end up nasty in the end and they wonder why. Start off with quality. If it looks like crap when you're done with it, you know it's your fault and that you should start over and try again until you get it the way you really want it. Push yourself, don't just settle.

Good luck!

See, I didn't even know the proper coding to learn XD.

Thanks for the tips. I'll follow your advice and tear apart all the skins I can find to see how they work :green: