Require designers input and help

Hello,

I’ve come up with a sort of design for the next theme, I doubt I could release it if it came to fruition because it’s not really practical.

Er..I digress.

Here’s the idea: http://sekhu.net/stuff/layout.gif

I’m not quite sure how to achieve that. See what I was thinking was, what if I just have a single background image, with all the shapes placed in the site, right? Then I just use that as the “design” for the site, with all the content going into the relevant shape. So there would be individual links in each shape for the subcategories. Along the top would be the main category links (home, category1, category 2, catgory 3, etc).

The difficult I’m coming across is understand how I can get the links within the shapes – should I follow the box method, and then simply use images for each individual category?

I would really appreciate some advice on this. I saw another theme that did something a bit out of the box, and I’ve tried to always attempt an out of the box style, but just never gone for it until I saw another WP site actually do it successfully, so if it’s possible and doable, then I have hope, if not I go to plan b…back to boxes….

thanks in advance