The site was set up mainly for accounting users with the progress of development and guide for usage of Skinstudio and IconDeveloper. Brought to you by Adam Najmanowicz - the lead developer of SkinStudio & IconDeveloper.
How to make the skin of your life in time for Gui Olympics 2004
Published on March 12, 2004 By Adam Najmanowicz In Skinning
Gui Olympics are about to begin.

I get a lot of requests from skin authors regarding various problems with their skins and asking various questions ranging from quite basic up to such that requires quite some research to answer them. So I decided to put all the documents that could help you create a great skin in one place.

There is a great article about making skins out there. I strongly encourage every skinner, both a beginner and a master ,to read that article. Even though it's pointed at WindowBlinds community and derived from its experience, it's not limited to WindowBlinds or any skinned or skinning application. Instead, the author assembles a set of guidelines for a generic gui skinner/remodeller. I must say it's about the greatest number of apt remarks I've seen in one place for quite some time and probably the best existing set of tips for skinners. The author goes so far to integrate some responses he received for his more controversial statements and replies to them in where he does or does not agree with the respondent.

This is actually is not the first article by Laurence Parry. You can read his other article about optimization of WB skins here

Laurence is the author of SkinBench the skin benchmarking tool used by Stardock and many skinners to measure and optimize their skins.
You can find SkinBench here. I strongly encourage you to play with that little app before releasing your skin.

Stardock also recently created a detailed documentation for making skins with SkinStudio.
You can find the documentation as a PDF document here
There is also a slightly dated visual tour and a simple tutorial accessible from that page.

If you're just starting your adventure with making WindowBlinds skins you may want to visit Aleksyandr's great tutorial which guides you throut the basics of making WindowBlinds skins.

Then there are also official WindowBlinds docs.
They are a bit outdated since virtually no skinner out there make WindowBlinds skins without the use of SkinStudio any longer. Even Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry started to use it quite a while ago (YAY!).

You may however want to consult the official WB documentation if you're planning to make a WindowBlinds skin with animated frames. This is not as intuitive as it could be but you can find the sollution to this problem here and here. Make a search for "anim.dll" on those pages.

You may also find a number of your questions answered in SkinStudio's official FAQ. However at that very moment it seems to be down. Above all look into how people solve their problems in their skins. Do not be afraid to modify their skins to learn. As long as you're not submitting them after doing that and do not claim to posess any copyright over such work, you're free to learn from them. After all, the worst that could happen is that you will have to delete and, re-download or import your favorite skin again!
Now that you're equipped with everything you need to know - go get your hands ridty and be succesfull in our big event. Good luck to all GuiOlympics 2004 contestants!
Comments
on Jul 31, 2004
hi my namn is yadgar