Starting Out

Dividing the work into seperate problems

• Lock Screen
• Boot Animations
• Wallpaper Design
• Icon Design
• MIUI apps design (dialer, contacts etc.)
• Special features

Out of the above tasks the bare essential for a theme is Lock Screen and Wallpaper. But if you're reading this guide it means you are more interested in advanced design.

Note: The problems can be approached in any order as desired. They are independent of one another.

How to approach a specific problem

Steps

• Designing (in GIMP)
• Scripting (in XML, called MAML)
• Repeat until satisfied

Then

• Zipping to *.mtz and using the portion of theme on the MIUI device
• If unsatisfied with results, repeat above steps