Thanks!  Mint has nice aesthetics to start with, and it didn't take a lot of work.
I created what, in my WordPress days, I'd call a "child theme."  In other words, I created a Mint-Y-Dark-Sand folder in ~/.themes, then created a cinnamon folder in that, and created a cinnamon.css file.  Cinnamon will load my file instead of the system's file, so my CSS file loads the system's CSS file, and then I adjust the descriptors and definitions I want to change.
My cinnamon.css file looks like this:
	
	
	
		Code:
	
	
		@import url("/usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Dark-Sand/cinnamon/cinnamon.css");
.panel-top {
  margin-left: 240px;
  margin-right: 240px;
  background-color: rgba(48, 49, 48, 0); }
.panel-top .panelLeft,
.panel-top .panelRight {
  background-color: rgba(197, 160, 124, 0.67);
  text-align: center;
  border-radius: 8px;
  padding-top: 2px;
  padding-bottom: 2px;
  margin-top: 6px;
  margin-bottom: 6px; }
.panel-top .panelLeft {
  padding-left: 4px; }
.panel-top .panelRight {
  padding-right: 4px; }
.workspace-button { width: 40px; }
.panel-left {
  margin-top: 80px;
  margin-bottom: 120px;
  padding-top: 8px;
  padding-bottom: 8px;
  border-radius: 10px; }
	 
 
Top panel is 40px.  Left panel is 60px and is set to Hide Intelligently.  I had to account for the top panel when centering the left panel, which is why the margin-top and margin-bottom values are different.
Honestly, I was only playing around with it to see what would happen -- I was working on a project at work with CSS buttons and I wondered if Cinnamon's CSS parser could handle it -- and I really like it.