A couple of interesting points there. The thing is, some themes are based on or designed around the wallpaper - I almost always do this with my personal themes.

The other point is, vertical themes or rather, the lack thereof. With far more widespread use of vertical monitors - esp. in multi-monitor set-ups - themers really ought to take this into account and either design the themes (and wall) to work well in both horizontal and vertical orientation, or make two versions of a theme, one for each orientation. I shall certainly keep this very much in mind from now on, esp. as I'm getting a present of another large monitor soon and plan on using one of my two biggies in vertical orientation - so much more useful when working on textual things and the like, or vertical orientation images even.

What happened to the rest of this thread?

Nexter appears to have separated the 'Vertical theme' aspect out into its own topic, presumably as a prompt to themers. The original thread is still at https://forums.winstep.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11960

Personally I wouldn't mind a separate thread / discussion area on how to create themes, as an assist to us noobies. There isn't much documentation on the config files, and although I've made some changes that I want so far, others don't perform as expected. To be fair I haven't managed to spend a lot of time on this recently, but I had previously come across some oddities.

Access to the knowledge of experienced themers would be appreciated.

That is indeed what I did, techlobo - I split my post off of the original thread. I did this on account of my post veering off the original topic somewhat tangentially. Maybe I should have made that clear and linked back to the original topic.

I thought for the longest time that we really ought to have a separate forum for themes related and theming topics, ideally even separate fori, one for questions/issues about themes and one purely for themers and perhaps aspiring themers. The things that currently (and now for the longest while) go against that are, 1) the absence of 'the thing that must not be named' (well, OK, as Jorge is currently not among us let's call its name - a GUI theme creator applet - currently, there is an alpha for theming docks only somewhere but it's buggy; you can probably find the link by doing a search here for 'alpha'; 2) the absence of a proper user guide to everything, and 3), the nowadays very small number of active themers, and 4), last but not least the lack of a dedicated theme repository on this website. Of these, number 4) underwent fairly comprehensive development a couple of years ago , with quite a number of themes already there, but it never got finished and officially online. I'll try and find the link in the beta forum when I get a moment but I don't think Jorge would want it made public here so I might send you it by PM.

Theming by editing the configuration files in most cases is a nightmare and a minefield for inexperienced users and can even make you lose your hair even if you are an experienced user but never got to know some of the later config files. It's very easy to make a complete mess of things if you're not sure of what you're doing.

The theming discussion has, at this point, been split off into its own topic and continues here -

https://forums.winstep.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11976

Hmm, odd. There seems to be marginally more interest in vertical orientation themes than the above general 'Theme Building' topic. Maybe the number of users of vertically oriented screens is increasing? I use one as my main display actually with one of my Linux boxes, mainly with textual apps and also web browsing. And if I had another monitor and the space, I'd use that vertically as well. So much more practical with almost everything except GFX.

Anyway, if I were using Windblows with a vertical screen, most themes would be damn awkward/ugly to use, or require a lot of re-configuration. So it certainly would be nice if theme builders made an effort to either design their themes so they work equally well vertically as horizontally, or supplied a horizontal and a vertical version of their themes. I know I shall certainly try my damnest to follow those principles in the future.