I was reading some posts today and stumbled across an amazing resource, started reading and it was impossible to put it down. End to end real world guidance on Branding. The authors: Andrew Connell and Randy Drisgill. If you have not seen what those guys can do, I recommend you look at their work, then again if you are in the SharePoint world and have not heard of them, where have you been hiding?
Anyway, here is the link to the very impressive MSDN article.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg430141.aspx