Hello, Well I should be finished making my site tomorrow so I guess I could it out then, but hey, I'm impatient. I know that taking away the border from an adsense unit can increase the CTR and make it look nicer, however I thought of an idea which I thought was pretty good but I have never seen it (or at least I can't remember seeing it). That is, to match the border color to the background of the page while having the cell color something different. Is this just not effective? Of against the Google TOS? Or am I just a genius? All of the above? Yeah, just wondering. Cheers.
You can do whatever you want with the colors and not violate the TOS. It is a very quick thing to change, so play around with it until you get the look you want.
Obviously, anything you can change with google's pallette tool is perfectly within the bounds of the TOS...
Generally, removing the border from the ad is agreed to have a positive effect (aka, increase clicks), so the thought is to remove it whenever possible, for the most part. The exception would be if you are using the ad right next to a picture where the adtext could be misleadingly seen to relate to the picture, in which case the TOS says you should indeed have a border there.
From what I've experience I usually go without borders. But I'm a noobie =). Maybe you should test all your ideas and see which bring in the most clicks. I would guess the non-bordered links matched to your text would work the best.