HAL is just a sample, but this works great with a picture that has some darker shading around the edges.
For me, I love to see as much of my homescreen picture as possible, but wanted access to applications without leaving the homescreen...so I hid them.
In the top left picture, the red circles indicate the location of the "Clock" (to HALs 10 o'clock) and "Browser" (to HALs 1:30 o'clock). They work just fine and also have the messages and calendar at the bottom...which I guess could be staggered differently.
At any rate...if you would like me to make you something like this with your own pictures...yes, you can customize up to like five of them, shoot me a PM.