| You alwys have to keep in mind the useabilty
of your skin. Many new skinners just make skins, which looks
amazing, but can hardly be used. Is there any real point in
that? A skin is an interface between you and the program,
so it should be easy to understand and quick to use. Try to
make the buttons not too small,, so u dont have to aim for
15 seconds till you hit the right button.
If you dont label the buttons clearly try using help tags
instead or alternative text in html (This displays a text
on mouse over.
Before you start designing, decide for a theme you want to
use or what you like, If you have no clue yet, skip this step.
Start researching on other people who create skins, and get
ideas. Do not RIP them, but look at how they made there skins,
how they layed em out, etc.
Every good artist looked at hundreds of other artists works
for inspiration and to learn from them. As a skinner, you
dont need to go to a museum, the internet is your museum.
Every single site on the internet and every single application
if good or bad can teach you how to make skins, or how NOT
to make them.
A good tool to locate sites are either artistry webrings,
or search engines Google and its Image category are amazing
tools for this task.
After you looked at ideas, start drawing you own skins. Dont
put too much time into it,. just make rough drafts. People
usally say do it on paper, and I agree to them, but you can
also use the pencil tool or equivalent in PS. (pen and paper
is soo much faster tough)
After you have drawn around 10-15 (or more) rough designs
look at them, and decided which concepts you like the most.
Pick around 3 and develop them further. Choose the one you
like the most and start puttin it into PS. Either scan in
it, and draw around it, or just try to replicate it.
Once you got the skin in PS, do whatever with it, create
buttons etc. There is only thing you should be careful with,
from the beginning onwards.Your basic shape....make it really
sharp, with either 0 transparent or 100% transparent pixel...nothing
in between. The pencil tool can help there.
In both images pink was used for making the transparent background.
Usually pink is used as noone would use pink in a normal skin,
so you can make every pink pixel transparent. Anyway, in the
first example, you can see that some pixels arent fully pink,
there are faded off, which makes them visble in the final
skin. 2nd example the same thing, but here its even crispier...
Here we got two skins, first one is an example how u can
make life easier. By adding a black border around the skin,
which ensures a more or less sharp edge. The 2nd one uses
modern edges and stuff to make the edges look sharp.
Slice you skin and done you are! |
