Does anyone here know how to go about creating a phpBB 3.0 style template? i dont actually want one for myself but a friend is looking for one that matches his sites layout/design... so i offered my services (free) - only problem is that was the 1st time  i had ever heard of PHPBB and all the references to making style templates are fairly vague. He has already got it up and running, it is functional.. just not similar to the rest of the site

Yip.  Creating themes for PHPBB is not as easy as for example wordpress, so I'd be interested in any good tutorials there too. 

What I ended up doing in the past is trying to find a pre made template that has a similar structure and then just saving over the graphics files with new ones.

I dont know about creating them...but here's a website that offers some:

http://www.phpbb3styles.net/db/

Maybe you can reverse engineer them? Sorry I'm not much help here, I don't use phpBB