Neither of those things are trivial.
I have no Idea how to hide the boot messages, and I personally wouldn’t, because if you have boot problems in the future they will be that much harder to debug.
As far as writing overlays that is a HUGE topic. It’s not feasible to write a complete how-to in a forum post. What specifically are you looking to do?
Info on applying existing Device Tree Overlays:
Here is a good resource for learning about the device tree by Thomas Petazzoni of Bootlin. He doesn’t get into overlays, but you kind of have to understand this first (EDIT: prepare yourself for some 0xBADCAFE):