© Carbonize.co.uk 2006 
Want to make your own skin or theme for Yahoo messenger? Well here's how.
You can find a lot of themes made by other people here.
But You came here to make your own so lets begin. Remember to save all your work into the same folder.
First lets make a background image for the buddy list. Remember that you want to be able to read your buddies names so either make the background light so you can use dark text or vice versa.
First open up your favourite paint program and create a new image that is approximately 240 pixels by 240 pixels. It doesn't have to be this size but this is the size Yahoo recommends. You could quite easily use a favourite photo or image from on the net. If so I recommend Irfanview for changing the images size and converting it to a .bmp.
Once you are happy with the image you have made/edited simpy save it as background.bmp.
At the top of your messenger are four buttons that are the tool bar. Three of them are message, chat and add. The fourth one depends on your version of messenger and is either call or mobile. So once again open your paint program and make a new image that is 48 pixels wide by 28 pixels high. Now make your buttons with whatever image and text you wish. If there are parts of the image you want to be transparent, or if you want a transparent background, then make that area magenta. The hex value for magenta is red=255 green=0 blue=255. The names for the buttons are chat.bmp, message.bmp and add.bmp. The name of the last one depends on your version of messenger and is either call.bmp or mobile.bmp.
You can also change the buttons you see at the top of the message windows. These are made exactly the same was as the buttons for the main window but are saved with the following names: file.bmp, ignore.bmp, invite.bmp, voice.bmp, voiceoff.bmp and webcam.bmp.
The last images we need to make are the ones to represent our buddies status. These images are 16 pixels by 16 pixels. You will need images for the following status images root (this is the one at the top of the buddy list), busy, offline, online on mobile and online. Once again use magenta to make areas transparent. The names to save the images as are busy_user.bmp, friend_root.bmp, offline_user.bmp, idle_user.bmp, online_mobile_user.bmp and online_user.bmp.
Now we have all our images we may wish, or need, to change the text colour for the text in the buddy list. To do this open up notepad or any text editor and put in the following
[Custom Color] Red=0 Green=0 Blue=0 [UI Settings] Buddy Font Face=Tahoma Buddy Font Size=8The first part, Custom Color, is used to specify the colour of the text. The above, 0 0 0, will result in black text. If you changed all the numbers to 255 you would get white text. The second part deals with the font face and size. Just change these to your favourite font and whatever size you wish. Now save this as Settings.ini. You may need to change the bottom part of the save window to All Files to prevent it making the file Settings.ini.txt.
Now give the folder a name, something like MySkin and then move the folder to the skins folder of your messenger. This is usualy C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\skins. Once it's there simply open up messenger, click Login in top right then click Preferences from the list that appears. Click Appearance in the left hand list and then select the skin you just made from the drop down list on the right. Click Apply and then Ok and you're done.
If you want some ideas or are a little confused simply download the adult skin by Basefaces that is available on this site or from the offical site.
© Carbonize.co.uk 2006