Skinning Aston2 Menu is not for the faint-hearted, it is hard, it takes a lot of time but that is something that you already know and it is time to finally  give you some useful info on how to make the whole process smoother . Ok buckle down here we go.

What will I present you here is two “anatomy maps” or “cheat sheets” and the way to use them. Easiest way  to make a skin for Aston2 Menu is to find a skin that has the layout that you like, analyze it and make your skin on top of it.

Step1

Go to the skin location (in my case on Vista 64 – C:\Users\krsta A2\AppData\Roaming\Aston2\Skins\Menu\) and copy skin to location where you want to work with it (E:\NewSkin\…or something), I’ll use my Chillounge skin so I’ll copy Chillounge.a2menu. Normaly I would use Total Commander but I’ll write special tutorial on using TC for skinning. Now extract Chillounge.a2menu by using any zip application (I recommend 7-zip ) and unpack it to for instance to E:\NewSkin\Chillounge\ you’ll see this files

You can see a2menu.xml which defines skin layout but that is a bit advanced for now,  DimPal or me will get into explaining that pretty soon but please go on and explore if you wish, index.xml which contains skin  info but we’ll get to that soon and prev.jpg which is skin preview that you see while browsing for skins in Theme Wizard.
And inside Aston folder you’ll find:
Besides XML files (Menu.xml,Panel.xml and Serach.xml) you’ll find skin.png file. That is the one we need!

Step2

Open skin.png file in your favorite graphics editor (PhotoShop,Illustrator, Fireworks….) and place it on  new layer which will be on the bottom of all layers you can even set transparency to 30 -40% but remember that you work on top of it so later when you are done with positioning of your elements you can freely remove that layer or hide it from view.

In order to figure out what goes where I made two “anatomy maps” and they are below (click on them and zoom in to see them full size):

And a bit easier to follow:

OK once you have positioned all where it should go remove or hide the layer you used as a guides. Save your file and export it to png file format. Save it as skin.png.

Step 3

Now to see how your theme works repack it again with your new skin.png file. Open zip packer (7-zip) select all of the files from Chillonge folder (where you unpacked all the files from Chillounge.a2menu) and select all of the files including Aston folder

And add it to archive but remember to pay attention to important details marked on the screenshot below:

And there you go you got yourself a skin.

Final Steps

There are only few things left to do (before you do the packing).

To change the description of the skin and the skin author name that you see displayed in Theme Wizard before you do the packing to a2menu format open file index.xml (any text editor like notepad will do but I recommend Notepad ++) and change the lines you see below and save it again.

And make your own skin preview image 500x350px and save it as prev.jpg. Now you can  pack that all again in to newskin.a2menu.
And oh yeah to apply the new skin you just created just double-click it and it will be applied and copied to skins folder.

That is about it. It is the easiest way to make Aston2 Menu skin but the bad side of this method is that you need to limit yourself to already existing layouts and while designing skins you have to keep that always in your mind. But before we get WYSIWYG skin editor we need to work with what we can. I would also suggest you to use Construction Aston2 Menu skin made by Alexander Zhelonin since it has marked positions for the elements and it can be very helpful also.

Next time I’ll dig in to xml editing a bit more since this method and tutorial does not cover changing fonts and fonts color which is pretty important too. Anyhow I hope you’ll find this useful and it will make your skinning easier.