Some thoughts on some favorites in the GUI Olympics

Tuesday, June 8, 2004 by Frogboy | Discussion: GUI Championships News

For those who are interested, I've gone through some of the more popular GUI Olympics entries and talked about what makes them special, why they might win, why they might not, and so on. Took quite awhile to do as you can imagine but I wanted to show how much energy the judges are putting into judging these events and show off some of the things about these skins that the casual user may not be aware of.

This is on the icons and WindowBlinds visual styles. If someone wants to write a round up of the favorite Winamp skins, let me know and I'll put that up too.

12 Reply 4 Referrals
WARCRY
Reply #1 Tuesday, June 8, 2004 9:00 PM
cyrix this year was the best to me cyrix cyrix cyrix

retiredmaster
Reply #2 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 4:41 AM
Ooh - thanks for including Pixel8 in there Brad!

Miloszwl
Reply #3 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 5:40 AM
Thanks for including my d3A. Just a small comment. I didn't make 9x version of my icons since they would look very choppy and simply miss some nice soft colors which are characteristic for XP. Time limit was also a problem. I think Rokey had the same reasons while making The Last Order.

b0se
Reply #4 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 7:48 AM
Thanks for your kind words Brad! I didn't realise that the toolbar icons and animations were weighted so much, I put all my efforts into the actual theme, I tend to think of icons as a seperate area. Good luck to everyone!

danioc
Reply #5 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 9:56 AM
Great article with important ponits. Thankx for all the effort to help the GUI community.

Frogboy
Reply #6 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 10:37 AM
bose: I can't speak for the judges on that because I don't know how much they'll weigh things. I will, of course, speculate: I think in the event that it's really really close on a given event that the toolbar icons and animations can make a slight edge. I think VectorCell is probably one of the best skin designs of all time (not just for this contest). Milo: Understand completely. Both The Last Order and D3A are icon packages that one looks at and instantly says "These are fantastic". Part of the point of the article, however, was to make it clear why judging is so hard. Because you have really fantastic designs like VectorCell and D3A whose quality stands on their own. But you have skins and icons that are at the same level of quality but have more content or support more OSes. The icons are really a good example of why I'm glad I'm not an official judge! Which matters more? An icon package whose key icons (those 20 or so icons that you see all the time) are fantastic if you're running on Windows XP? OR the icon package who has nearly as good icons for those first 20 but aren't *quite* as attractive but works on every version of Windows AND has 3 times as many icons so that all those file type icons are automatically taken care of? If you were a judge, what would you do? What would you say to the guy who comes in second? Last time around, it was much easier. There were some skins that just towered over the others and they all had the same features.

b0se
Reply #7 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 11:44 AM
Yes must be a difficult process, so big props to the Judges. Thanks for the compliment also, very much appreciated Lots of excellent skins have been designed thanks to this competition, WB, WA and IP sets I'll be using for a long time to come

treetog
Reply #8 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 12:34 PM
I would like to thank Brad, for the fantastic article. Very well written, as he usualy does and covers many points. I know how much time was putted in this contest by Brad and his wonderful Stardock team and bet that he also did this article in his VERY rare spair time. So, I would like to thank you, Brad in the name of the Pixtudio team, you did a hell of a job!

Miloszwl
Reply #9 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 1:22 PM
my answer is very simple: i would create 2 different categories - classic icons (windows 9x) - modern icon (win xp) Very good example is Pixelpalooza where You have classic and OS X categories. I think that comparing win9x and winXP icons is not a good idea since there is a great technical difference between them. Let's hope next year there will be 2 different categories for icons Milo

voo
Reply #10 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 5:09 PM
Next year? Its every two years... Probably by then 2006 nobody will be using 9x.

Rokey
Reply #11 Wednesday, June 9, 2004 11:53 PM
Thanks for the article,although my English is not good enough to complete understand each words and their mean,but i can feel that,Thanks Frogboy,also the treetog Miloszwl,b0se.so appreciated stand with u

Miloszwl
Reply #12 Thursday, June 10, 2004 2:10 AM
"Probably by then 2006 nobody will be using 9x" - you are dreaming

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