Vanilla 2.0.3 - Guide to Theme Building?

I'm hoping to build a vanilla theme to fit my forums into the design of a site I'm working on. I've tried plugging my site's HTML layout into the master.design.tpl file in the "views" folder and then filling in what I thought were the required {asset name="XXXXXX"} tags to fill in the forum components, but I got a bonk error upon testing, and I am obviously missing something.

Being very new to PHP, is there a quick and simple guide to know what I need to add to my existing HTML to get the forum components to work? Or are there any good guides out there to get me started in Vanilla theming?

Thank you!

Lykaon

I just finished writing my own theme for my site and I just leaned heavenly on existing themes. I wrote the css from scratch, but the php parts I got by looking at other themes and then adapting to my needs.

In particular, I found the joie theme to be insightful. It changes up the layout a little to give you an idea of how exactly you would do that.

The other option is to find a theme you like and literally start with it and make tweaks along the way as needed.