Right, I'll try to follow radestock's lead and try to give, from the point of view of a novice skinner, a few pointers for getting started. However, it's true that the question is extremely broad, and it's perhaps easier to give useful advice if we had some better idea of what you want to achieve...
I started by taking a skin I liked (radestock's own Chameleon) and thinking about what wasn't perfect about it. First of all I wanted to change the base colour so I edited all the blue panels and boxes in Photoshop by creating an action to add a hue/saturation adjustment layer and running a batch update directory by directory. Very very simple, but aside from giving results I liked it gave me some familiarity with the structure of the graphics files used in FM skins - something that's essential if you want to start making a skin from scratch.
Encouraged by that I decided to make further graphical changes, first by creating simpler box borders (I'd seen JAndersson's Elegance by this point and liked elements of that a lot too) and later by changing all the header, footer and sidebar graphics to match my new style. I used the graphics already in the skin as a template to give me an indication on how to sensibly slice my new panels so they behaved nicely in the game - cross-comparing with a second skin (I used both Elegance and Metallic) increased my understanding of where I needed to stick with rules of sizing to match the xml and where I could get away with just using common sense. I also changed fonts.
At this point I'd managed to get a skin that had a lot of the appearance I wanted without having to do anything particularly technical. It's still very identifiably a product of Kevin Radestock's hard work and ingenuity and not my own, but that's fine for my purposes - after all, I'm playing with this for my own use, not for anyone else to be impressed by. You may find that playing with the graphics in a skin you like is enough to give you the effects you want - I certainly think a lot of those who post in the request threads for club-specific skins could do a lot for themselves this way.
Making basic graphical changes for FM is not complicated - I consider myself to have no graphical skills whatsoever - but it is a great way to get to understand the structure, and in my opinion is absolutely essential before you think about even the slightest cosmetic change to the xml.
Go have a play with it, and report back to us - we might be able to answer more specific questions better, and you may find things that the likes of me can learn from (even if it's unlikely you'll get to teach the experts much). Once you're comfortable with that I might try to write a basic introduction to xml in FM based on my experiments, but hopefully someone who knows a lot more than I do will have a go first!
Good luck!
Cato
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