Hello, Im new to skinning. and i just made my first skin without using a skinner. and i want to know how i did.
any feedback you can give would be great, even if negative.
here is a screen shot http://www.winamp.com/customize/comp...om_the_sea.jpg

and here here if you wanna download to get a better feel
http://homepages.go.com/~flippweiser/mntfromsea.wsz


thank you

Interesting idea you have going there, and a fair start at your first amp

Areas to improve...

Main window, far to much base skin in there to be acceptable, go back and work on those buttons, particulary the volume, balance, posbar and eq/pl buttons, how about making them birds flying over the sea or something, maybe a bit of animation in the volume and balance buttons. Also you main play buttons, need a little bit of movement adding to them, at present it's hard to tell if they are pressed or not. Try also blending the background of your image into your numbers.bmp so they don't stand out so much. The black background is a little harsh against the blue sky. Winshade mode also need tweaking, again looks far to close to base skin, but with a blue tint to it. Also the Vis effect is standard base skin, think about changing that

EQ, better window all around, groovy effect with the sliders, giving a rippling water effect. Winshade mode is done on this one, but could do with some openers and closers adding to it.

Playlist, not a lot to be said here, its pure base skin, with 5 buttons added for playlist stacks, and the whole thing tinted blue, would seriously go back to this one and try blend it in with the rest of your design

MB, same here, pure base skin thru and thru, tinted blue again.

AVS, not present

All in all a good start, but keep working on it.

Hope this helps in some way
Back to the day job :)

Nice skin for a first one!! I agree with everything Mr Jones has already said. One other little thing you might want to fix is your main and eq titlebars, they shift up and down when moving from window to window. Other than that, you're off to a nice start! :)

i had an idea but i need a little help. i want to put a little speed boat as the button for the eq slider but i cant find a picture of one that small and im not good enough to draw one. if anyone could help me out that would be awesome.

Jayn
 

Hey, I love your skin Jayn. I have been trying for a while now to get a skin into the featured skins section but cant come up with anything good enough! What programs do you use (i.e. paint or graphics programs). Please let me know.

Re: Jayn
 

If it's any use to you, speaking from my perspective as a past five star skinner I use the following apps to craft my stuff.

Paint Shop Pro 6.2, nice user freindly and great to work in about a 100 differnt layers LOL altho am looking to move up to PSP7
MSpaint, yeah I know, not exaclty sophisticated but very useful for quick cut pasting of elements,also good for fine pixel work
I also use a simple cursor prog I downloaded of the net, think it's called "cursormaker v1.2" or something like that, dont have a copy on this laptop to confirm it, but nice simple prog.
notepad of course, best text editor around
viseditor 1.2 , for the vis area, nice simple
utility, download off the net

I'm looking to move onto Photoshop at somepoint in the future, just waiting for work to buy a copy and I'll be *aheeem* borrowing it for an evening :)

Back to the day job :)

Thanks Mr. Jones
 

Thanks for the tip. I didn't realise you were such a great skinner! I haven't seen any of your work. I will be on the look out for some of thos programs. By the way, what do you do for a living. I need some ideas for my future, as I am a student looking to move on to university. I take it you do work with computers?

Cheers
 

I found that Viseditor program! I think it is the only one from your list I don't have! Now I just need to find out where I downloaded it too :)

simplisity is best!!
 

Mmm, what I have started to use for my skinning is MS Paint!! Nice and simple. I use a skinner to create a base skin, then sort out all the buttons and effects after using that!!