What makes a skin 'good'?

First of all, personaly I find a skin good when its complete.

Complete is the magic worth, also you don't want text and buttons on the wrong place.

For example when you have a glassbackground for the username and then the text is half off it.


and ofcourse, graphics

Make sure everything is readable, non visibility of text in dropdownmenu's or taskbar is a big no

Complete is good, Imagination is much better

Attention to detail...

Complete
Attention to detail

But most of all you must like it.

gobs of patience

Jafo, what about gray and transparant?

Everyone will give you a different answer. Roleup is something I don't use but someone else will want it.Everything skinned that can be skinned for one thing. Then it goes to color and that is an individual choice.

stick to white,gray,black you can't do anything wrong with those.

Many thanks for the adivce. I have an idea for a skin that seems simple enough to execute, but from what I've seen on the help boards it's a case of easier said than done.

Again, thanks to all.

Sometimes a decal or text ruins a skin.

I like skins that can be used in more than one theme, such as yellowgreen lemon, which can be either used in nature, green colored theme, or halloween theme.

Make sure you test all of the skin's aspects for errors or misalign or whatever, I saw a amazing skin, but with miscolored text and some misaligns, making it look cheaply done. Who wants a amazing car that has a missing starter, and gas tube thats not connected properly, and a doors that won't close properly due to misaligns?

it's easy to tell a good skin..........it usually says Pixtudio or Skinplant next to it.

BoXXi, what about the other great artists, I have seen some work around here that beats the old skins of pixtudio with ease.

for example adni18's work

I agree with Jafo...I cant stand it when I d/load a skin and it has a bunch of things that dont match cause the creator said "Well, this is kinda messy, but no one will notice."

GreenReaper wrote a great article on what makes a good skin.

http://www.zen9361.zen.co.uk/mgs/index.html

Skin is good when You like it. Everything should be positioned perfect, color harmony, precise shapes. If You make a button and it goes somehow wrong, make it from the beginning, but in different way.

nice advices....one from me....use Adobe Photoshop for layers and a GIF Animation software for anim fx....you can also use Macromedia(R) Fireworks (R) for font fx and other great hover FX

I'm beginning to see there's more to this than just putting together some graphic files and calling it a skin. There needs to be some forethought and planning.
This may take longer than i expected.

O.k., from start to finish, how long does it take to build a skin?

And before I forget, MikeB, thanks for the link.