Greetings,
I had one of these mods posted there before.. not sure what happened.
Cutline meets grunge:
Anywho, my first attempt at a Cutline Mod was my site: www.thirdeyemag.com
Cutline meets Carnival/Vaudville/Western:
My new attempt, which pretty much just uses cutline as the foundation but totally hacks the crap out of it:
So let me know what you think, let me know of errors. If you can't figure something out, best way to reach me is through the contact form at the Thirdeye site, as I don't check these forums all the time.
However, my biggest advice for you if you want to pull anything off remotely similar:
Download Firefox, install the Firebug add-on. This enables you to examine elements of a webpage, it outlines them for you and tells you what parts of the style sheet are affecting it. This invaluable tool will save you many hours by telling you exactly what styles to modify to accomplish what you need.
I am not going to teach you the basics of CSS. It's a very simple language, very intuitive, and if you want to learn it the best way is to do what I did: http://www.w3schools.com/ for the official CSS tutorial. In no time you should be able to do all of the basics. The hard stuff is layout, and Cutline has already taken care of that for you.
One common error some folks have with doing the types of things I've done is when it comes to adding a background image behind the content area and also to the background itself.
You add the main background image to the body tag via css, add the content background to the "container" element. The main problem people have is this background won't repeat all the way down. This is because floated elements don't affect the size of their container elements and if you look, every "core layout" element in Cutline has float: left applied to it. Just set the footer to float: none, and it should pull down your background image.