[TheMilkCarton]

Well, the way the headings are halfway on/halfway off the box would be almost impossible, since the background behind the boxes isn't solid. However, you could use transparent PNG-8 or transparent PNG-24 (better transparency) and position them like that. However this would look weird in IE6 because of lack of proper PNG transparency.

For variable stuff, you wouldn't really have to "set anything". Just use the variables that are there. If you were doing this for forum categories, you could use $forum[forumid].png or $forum[title].png in the forumhome_forumbit_level1_nopost template. It would take a lot more modification than that though, if you were going to position the headings halfway off the tables like in the picture.

Alternatively, you could look up sIFR. It lets you replace regular text with Flash text in any font you want. It's better for Accessibility and SEO, also, since the original text is still in the HTML, whereas if you used images for headings, the only things bots/screen readers have to work off of is ALT text. Beware though, sIFR isn't exactly easy to set up... and you have to have Flash Professional to embed your own fonts.