My first skin comments please...
 

This is my first skinning attempt so don't be too harsh. It took me a couple hours to make since I didn't know what I was doing and I hadn't planned anything out either.

I just saw CTHD for the first time and I really loved it. So after searching for skins, none of them were really pleasing to me, so I decided to try and make my own one. I know the movie has been out for some time and a lot of people might not want it, but this was basically for myself. I liked it a lot; so I thought others might too.

I think it turned out pretty good considering it was my first try at skinning. Hope you like it. Any comments on how to improve it?

Also...
 

The jpg is really compressed, the colors in the real one are A LOT more vibrant than that in the pic (especially the yellows).

Lots of good ideas there - I'd like to see this in a revisit once you get a few more ideas under your belt. One thing I would lose are the volume/balance sliders. I also would like it more if you continued your color scheme more forcefully into the playlist/mb. I understand why you didn't and I appreciate it, but I still think with a little work, you could use the background there.

Overall I'd just lose the 'rigidness' that peeks through from your base skin. For instance, I love your cbuttons... but your mono stereo and EQ lettering turns me off. As I said, good work though, and I look foward to seeing what else you do. :D :D Keep it up.

I might also have added a shadow on the right side of chow yung fat's face, since it is obscured by your EQ bars. Nice placement BTW - you really lucked out that a standard movie poster 'fit' this well.

Yeah. I'm just going to reiterate what BullGawD said. Nice skin. It's a good start but it needs a little more work to eradicate the base skin elements (mono/stereo, eq/pl, vol/bal) and I think you could try going ina completely different direction with the pl. I haven't seen the film, but as I gather it's a martial arts film, so maybe you could introduce some other aspects of that. Maybe chains and boxes and that kind of thing. Just a suggestion. But great start and I look forward to the completed product.

Thanks for the input.
As I said this was my first skinning attempt. I only briefly looked at what each bitmap did. I wanted to remove some of the buttons too, but I didn't know how. I guess I'll have to do some more research on that. I want to get rid of those numbers on her face and most of the buttons beside it. I would have also done it on the bars on the middle section too. I know those bamboo stalks with the fighters on them is kind of cheesy, but that was all I could think of to put there.

I guess I will try adding something to the pl. I just used lots of layers in PS to get the alignment right. So yeah, there are lots of the base skin still visible.

Thanks again for all your comments on how to improve this.

grrrr
 

i think u have potentialities as a human amp skinner

I worked on it a little bit more.

The most notable changes are the sliders and other buttons in the the main window are no longer visible, the pl uses the bg of the CTHD pic, the new font in the play list (I think it fits the theme better now), and the color changes for the little rising bars (excuse my lack of terminology, basically all I use is the main window to play simple wav files) in the main window.

I will have to test how the pl works with some changes since I read about it being difficult to skin because it is resizable. Maybe I can add something in the blank space from the buttons in the main window. I was thinking maybe the 3 main actors names... don't know how it would turn out though. But anyways, thanks again for your comments. I think it looks better now.

grrrrrrr
 

dam resizeable pl's, it messes you up when you use a texture...

excellent first skin, love the colors . . . i personally like to see movie/human skins but they are so often not done very well- however, your skin is true to the films atmosphere, it complements it very well, when can we expect a download?

Keep the volume
 

I consider the volume to a pretty important control on Winamp. One option that you have is to trim pixels off the bottom of the slider bmp so that it's not so obvious, yet still functional. Instead of making the slider 14 pixels tall, trim it down to 6 or 7 (only take pixels from the bottom of the bmp). You could even make another sword out of the volume bar. Keeping with the theme, two swords to a samuarai, or is that a Ninja. I'm a little behind on my Kung-Fu Theater. Nice job.

Hey thanks for the idea evildick. I never thought about trimming just a little off. I'll look into it.

And the download will be available as soon as it is published. Or I could just put it up for d/l somewhere else and you can d/l if you like. Or email me at collin@san.rr.com if you want to and I'll be glad to send it.