A LytBar skin describes a few color values, the overall background, the images for each of 12 buttons, wallpaper to be used in Menus, and the "stock" icons that LytBar and StarLyt use.

At the top, are two background images. The one at the top will be used on Pocket PC machines (at the top), and the one below will be used on older machines (where the taskbar appears at the bottom). Note that these images can be any width, up to the 640 pixels of the skin image itself. The width that's used depends on the machine that it's run on, and how it's set up. 240 pixels wide is the standard.

In between the two images, at the extreme left, are 8 pixels that define colors. Specifically, these are the Transparent Color, Clock Color, and then Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. These colors can be referred to by the PlugIns. For example, the Info PlugIn will use the two colors defined here as "Red" and "Green".

Below the background images are the 12 button images, with the image above representing the Up position, and the lower one the Down position. Note that these images also use the Transparent color. Wherever the transparent color appears (green, here), the background image will show.

To the right of the buttons is the Menu Wallpaper image. This image can actually be of any size, since it's position and dimensions are specified in the text file described below. In this particular skin, the wallpaper image is actually taking up space that could be used by the background images and the buttons. That's OK, as long as LytBar doesn't need to use a 640 pixel background image, or refer to the last (12th) button image.

Below the buttons, are the icons that are used by LytBar and StarLyt. In creating new skins, you can simply copy the images that are here, or change them to suit your tastes.

The skins are 'bmp' files, and should be placed in the Skins subdirectory. Each skin also supplies a text file, with the same name. This describes the names of the buttons that will appear in the Image combo in the Control Panel applet. It also describes how the PlugIn image will move when the button is pressed. In the Default skin, the dx, dy values are 0, and 0, so that the image does not move when the button is pressed.

These are just the hard standards for skins. There may also be other conventions that will make the user's life easier.