While having an ego is healthy, having an ego to the point of being arrogant to others.. is not typically healthy and stems from feeling inadequate and needing to prove ones self worth.. Ego is healthy in doses (It can inspire some to achieve goals they typically wouldn't strive for) But having to much ego to the point it over takes your better judgment and it becomes a driving force to the point you feel the right to stomp on others. Is not healthy and can actually hinder your daily interaction with the community around you.

I will state this. No one skinner by them selves will break skinning or the skinning community. Many fantastic artists of the highest caliber no longer skin,Dangeruss,Doodle,Lonerunnr,Thredz for example, while I loved their skins/programs and sorely miss them, they did not make up skinning (even tho they helped it get started). Nor did skinning cease to exist when they took leave of it.

I have been around skinning since it's infancy (mid 1997). I have seen skinners come and go, Sites come and go, yet desktop customization remains.

Any one skinner who deludes him self to believe he/she is the be all of skinning, and that it would crumble without his or her contributions,is sorely mistaken.

My post is not aimed at any one in particular, I just get bummed when I see my fellow Community members behaving badly towards each other. We should be helping each other grow and achieve higher levels of awareness within our skinning and our daily lives. We,like society at large, have the choice to either better our selves and each other in turn.. or destroy our selves and all thats around us....please choose wisely...

I think a good example of the "balance" we may be looking for here is the manner in which Tiger Woods expresses himself. Every time he tee's up his ball he thinks he can win and has confidence in his ability. If he doesn't win he's humble about it and can easily note why he may not have. If he does win he's humble about it but able to note why he was able to win. To me, he has a very good balance of all of the issues that are being discussed here. Let's face it, he's under a very large "Looking glass" and if he were to abuse any of the factors involved here he'd get hammered like a finish nail with a sledge. There's a balance in everything and like anything else in life, however it feels inside, it needs to be CAREFULLY MANAGED publicly.

Kitty's opening post opens the door and gives 'Masters' a permission to speak perhaps in a way they may otherwise not. It's usually pretty hard for someone to just say "Well, I am a Master and so this is my advice". I would welcome any advice in such a setting and not interpret it as 'ego'. If that were the case, no Masters could even reply in the thread.

Let's see now, from reading all this; Remember everything is just someone elses opinion - don't mention skins or skinners good or bad by name - don't skin for praise through the rating system - only skin to please yourself..... Well, I guess you get what you get with that approach.

I wish we had a 'sort by' - Masters only, so I wouldn't even have to look at the rest. Oh that's right we do .... Maxstyles.com.   

NM

Well said HG for reply #41.

Had to correct you IR. The way you said it makes me an elitist.   

Everyone can always do better. ( weeeeell except for Tiggz )

A Citizens thoughts :I am generally not in threads but this one is really very helpful and encouraging thanks to all the masters for their Tips..

Just a suggestion all of us visit the site almost everyday and maybe spend most of our time here all i would love is to have a master commenting on my skin sometime and saying this is where you could improve the skin or technique.It will be even more helpful.

and i skin for the colors and trying to improve my skills on PS and trying to see can i really improve or not.

Danillo, your english is just fine by me and you echo the context of what I was trying to say in a previous posts.

Skinning is fun, when it ceases to become fun, you have a problem - a big problem. For some skinners (myself included), I skin what I like to skin and the parts that I feel are necessary for the skin to look good. If that is 3/4 skinning so be it. That is my personal choice, if one day I want to take it to the next level and skin everything completely, that will be my choice as well, no one elses. I don't need to judge someone else's skin and tell them they're doing it the wrong way or they're skinning just for downloads and I also don't have a need to argue with someone if they are just skinning for downloads, if that's what they want to do, why should I tell them different.

I will also argue that most of the users on this site are not sheep as previously eluded to. Think about that kind of statement. If that were true, the bulk of the people visiting wc and downloading skins and buying products from this site are sheep, this site basically caters to sheep... does anyone want to believe that! I sure as heck do not want to believe that. I'm sure the everyday users of this site that download skins on a daily basis don't want to be labeled as sheep. These users just like everyone participating in this discussion come to this site because they made a decision to come to this site, a personal choice to visit this site, all of it's skin sections and they also made the decision to download the skins that they want to download. I can't control them, you can't control them - they will download what they like just like I will.

Control is basically an illusion, the only actions & thoughts you can really control are your own. You can't control someone else's actions & thoughts. The most important thing is to be happy with yourself (even if that means mediocrity in all of it's glory). That's why I guess NT is allowed to make those comments, it sucks for me to read them but I guess I could have chosen not to read them. But I did choose to read them and I even chose to respond to them. Because just as much as certain "master" status users on this site have had an opinion of certain skinners and their work for apparently a period of time right now, in the end it doesn't really matter. Myself and the other skinners that don't have "master" status and quite probably never will, can continue skinning and uploading skins that aren't "master" quality and be happy with them. I am happy with the skins I've uploaded to this site (even the ones that I titled with a color, an act I am "guilty" of performing, fyi - my skins labeled with a color were easier to find when performing a search on this site before the keywords function for the skins was added)

The freedom to skin what I like is something that I have, it's my personal choice to do so and if I receive crazy downloads for it - GREAT! If I don't, guess what, I was happy with the skin before I uploaded it, I liked it and in the end, that's the most important thing to me. I actually use the skins I create on my own machines (novel idea, I know).

Bashing someone's skin in the skin comments isn't constructive criticism, it's destructive. Maybe I don't know anything about the diamond skin and that it's possibly included with the new version of sks, heck I still use sks5 (because it took me forever to get used to it and now that I know it, I'm a little cautious about moving on to sks6) but I was told long ago by other skinners that if a skin is a blatant rip of another skinners skin (say skinner's skin 10 times really fast), you don't post a comment in their skin section, you contact a moderator or admin, present your findings and then let them do the detective work and make the necessary call. That's the accepted way of doing this. It would seem to me that someone with the "master" status should know about this accepted protocol and act accordingly instead of posting comments that could possibly be considered as hurtful, not just to the skinner who uploaded the skin but to the users reading skin comments.

Reading the first few comments in this discussion about how skinners should be skinning fully, doing this & that, etc. Well if that's the case and we're setting such high standards for normal skinners, the unfortunate or possibly more fortunate result is that "master" skinners are held to a higher standard but not just in skinning but in the way they represent this site and the "master" status. If you've been granted the "master" status on this site, you need to take into account that you are held to a high standard, possibly the highest on this site, not just in skinning but in how you represent yourself to this site and it's users (aka sheep) and the skinning community in general. Don't expect to hold me and any other regular skinner on this site to any standards if you can't meet & exceed the expected requirements of a "master" skinner.

There's my 0.02 cents, they were free but still hold alot of value.
Hopefully you can see that I kept this discussion respectable & mature.   

Worth way more than 0.02c, unclerob ....

I see nothing wrong with holding people to standards. As the matter of fact, having no standards seems kind of rediculous to me. Let's face it folks, the standards around here have gotten way too liberal. So liberal there are none.

Each and every review of Windowblinds is the same... Great program, lots of crappy skins to choose from. That's the real world speaking, not any Master, not any beginner, nor sheep. It's an unbiased opinion which speaks very loudly. Perhaps some sort of standard could be useful around here.   

The GUIO has a standard that everything in a skin must be skinned. This isn't too much to ask. If a 1/2 ass skinned skin suits your needs, great for you but does it HAVE to be shared?

Perhaps it is time for someone to give all this some serious thought and perhaps make up some guidelines/ standards for what is an acceptable skin and what isn't. I didn't make a stink about a crappy skin. I made a stink about someone using someones elses work and taking credit for it. If you all think that is an elitist move then clearly any action taken by a Master is an elitist move around here. I got recoil recently for pointing out some mistakes in someones skin and the Author asked for testing to be done. You simply cannot win.   

For the record....Sometimes thing really don't go so well in private. As a little birdie whispered in my ear this morning, public executions can be effective.

Jest in case you have come to think some of us 'exalted' ones take ourselves too seriously...I have made a little cartoon for you.(seriously,do you think someone who calls himself IR Brainiac takes himself seriously?)  

Some are taking offense to the sheep thing...is it not true that attaching Vista or Aero to a skin will guarantee more downloads?Baaaaaaaaa.  Thats why we have pop music...if everyone had taste,there would be no Backstreet boys.  

Now indulge yourself in the levitation of your spirits at my expenditure.  

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the GUIO?
Are you referring to the GUI Olympics?
I did a search on google and came up with "growing up is optional"   

FYI - On a more serious note... Public executions are not effective unless the effect you are trying to acheive is instilling fear in others. - That doesn't seem like fun to me.   

IRB, you are hilarious Bro!   
It's nice to see that some of you "exalted" ones have a sense of humor. Who knew?!   

Why not?

Conversely if a 1/2 arsed skin does NOT suit your needs , great for you but must you deny others?

Typically that 'unbiased opinion' by reviewers re 'lots of crappy skins' is the confusion of 'quality' and 'personal taste'....aka if you don't like the style it MUST be crap.

Skinning is a lot bigger than one person's opinion....or one bunch of so called 'unbiased' reviewers' opinions.

It really is a lot about 'each to his own', just as any and ALL forms of 'artwork' are both diverse, intricate or naive...

Noone said it was fun. Just effective.



You have it right... we just can't refer to it in the other term you used as it is a violation of Olympic trademark rights.

Well said Jafo..  

Please stop this faltu vichar vimarsh

Essorant's top Master Skinning tips:

- usable first, decorative second (no point having a beautiful but useless skin is there?)
- don't move the min/max/close buttons to somewhere strange
- 'highlight text' colour should be black!
- make your skin xp AND vista ready - don't go half way!
- we don't need another xp/vista/mac/your_OS_here clone - think of something original
- take your time
- respect people's opinions of your stuff - unless they are just being silly and unconstructive
- remember there is always someone better than you - learn from them, but don't just copy their designs
- orange and pink tartan is a bad choice of colour scheme - don't go mad, but don't limit your palette either
- learn modesty if it's not a skill you already have
- enjoy yourself!

I'm not really qualified to tell anyone how they should skin Windows. These are just tips for myself! (...and I kinda got the impression that this thread's intention was more about master skinners sharing skinning tips? It has become a debate.)

Tim.

Oh! The miserable topic
The masters wrote
A giant gloomy epic
They faught
They taught
But forgot
Many topics have got
No answers from the lot
Oh! The miserable topic