I was once a nOOb too,believe me, this is my first screenshot ever, that I took somewhere like 10 months ago,during the gold times of sweeter home, and just like you are now, I had no idea of how things were meant to be done, also some of the most used apps now where not even released yet so the options were a bit more limited. It takes practice, lot of it, a lot of trial and error, you need to read a lot and visit as many sites as possible to gather the best information from all. Just to give you an idea, I normally visit around 10~12 forums daily, some of them I wont even close the page the whole day, and some others I will be there just once or twice a day, but there's always something new that you can add to your arsenal of tools to make nice setups.
Also it won't hurt if you could learn some image editing, you can get Photoshop but its kind of pricey, or GIMP its free, even though it lacks of some of the options that you have on PS.
Like on the screenshots above, the entire second screen was manipulated with Photoshop, on the 3rd screen the Phone,SMS, and Mail icons were custom made same as the wallpaper for that screen and the 4th one too.
It also requires patience, if you are planning to have something like the above ready in 1hr,you should look to get busy into something different; even with all the practice that I have, all combined took me around 4~5 hrs to put all that together, but that includes starting from scratch like searching for the right wallpapers (that takes a while, trust me) about 30~40 minutes alone on that, to all the PS edit (at least 2.5 hrs) to set up all the widgets and icons...etc..
Also it has nothing to do if you are rooted or not, you can still achieve the same results both ways but just for reference this shots came from my rooted Tbolt.
I hope all this give you a better understanding of how some of us are doing it, for some, all this is overkill, but some others like me, enjoy a lot doing all this :icon_ banana: if you have questions don't hesitate to ask.!
