How to Make Your Own iPod Skins: Design iPod Stickers in Photoshop

Okay, okay - what are iPod stickers? If you purchase them, they're the nifty little vinyl pieces, backed with adhesive, pre-cut to fit your iPod. Stickers - or more commonly called skins - are the sticky pieces of artwork that you can use to adorn your iPod both to protect it and to really add some style and personality.

So, stickers are skins and skins are stickers.

Using Photoshop, it's easy to design the same kind of skins that you'd purchase somewhere ... and end up with the same design that hundreds of other people have. Talk about a unique personality, right? We want truly original, so we are going to go for it ourselves.

What do you need? Technically speaking, you only need a full sheet label (for example, Avery 5455) that you can print on any printer and a graphics program. You could, technically, do this in something as simple as Microsoft Paint ... but it will be a much more time-consuming process. What we're going to be using in this guide is Adobe Photoshop. Absolutely any version will be able to accomplish the task, but the directions will be specific to Photoshop CS2 so if you're using an older version (or Elements), you'll have to look around for some of the tools I'll be talking about.

What we're going to create is a self-adhesive iPod skin - to fit any iPod with a click wheel - that will last for a good month or two and won't leave a sticky mess behind when you peel it off. It will protect your iPod and when it starts to show signs of wear, you can easily make another!

Step One: The Template

We don't want to re-invent the wheel if we don't have to - which we don't - so we're not going to. Instead, we're going to borrow this template (http://www.ruthannzaroff.com/mirkwooddesigns/ipodcover.htm) by Mirkwood Designs.

Go ahead and save the template to your computer, and then open it up in Photoshop.

Step Two: Prepare the Canvas

This is quick and painless - we just need to set the template up in Photoshop so it can be used easily. So, open the template up in Photoshop and we'll first set it to RGB mode by clicking "Mode", and choosing "RGB". If you don't do this step, the template will be in grayscale and you won't be able to do any colors.