Here's someone that we haven't seen for awhile--he was a part of the crew at Maxstyles, along with Bilbo, Basj, and vStyler. This is from the Skinning Stories forum thread at Skinnalicious.
http://www.skinnalicious.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?start=0&topic_id=17&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&type=&mode=0
In in his own words, then.....
Hey man, you can put up the following:
I’m a skinner. I guess. For me it started back in 2005 when I stumbled upon WinCustomize.com. How I got there I can’t remember I believe I was looking for some icons. I remember being AMAZED at the stuff I found on that site. I couldn’t believe it. What I really couldn’t believe was that I could have been in the dark for so long. Like a thousands of other people, I knew I could change the color of Luna and of course my icons and wallpaper. But WindowBlinds blew me away! I was so impressed with the artistic ability and creativity of some of the artists. It was amazing.
One of the things that gets on my nerves the most is a cluttered desktop. I love minimalism. Having a load of icons on my desktop was not an option, so I’d keep mine as clean as I could. When I found ObjectDock, I was in "heaven". I used OD for a bit before I stumbled upon a guy that was making something a bit different for OD. His screen name on WinCustomize is Diafragma. I immediately wanted to do what he was doing. So I dug in and created the Alien Skin tiles. The tiles I was making were pretty well received, at the time there weren’t a lot of Dock Makers out there. One of the best was WebGizmos. He had a huge gallery of docks that matched a lot of WindowBlinds on the site. I jumped right in like any newb would. The first person to contact me about my crappy work was WebGizmos. He offered tips on how I could make my stuff work better. I’ll be the first to say that I raked him over the coals with questions. How do you do this? Is this right? Is this possible? Etc. He was very patient with me and always answered my questions. I owe my success to him. He was a great mentor.
I’ve try to follow WG’s example whenever anyone asks me for help. I think skinning should be for everyone, no matter their skill level. The more you do something, the better you’ll get. I mean, look at some of my old stuff compared with now, huge difference. At some point, I need to get that crap off my page or updated it…time is something I have little of it seems. Anyway, I have noticed a lot more folks are skinning ObjectDock and that is great. The more the better. That means that folks like WebGizmos and me can maybe move on to something else. Expand our horizons so to speak.
Currently, I skin ObjectDock, Rainlendar, Xion, RightClick and SideBar Styler. I’ve made icons and wallpapers too. I haven’t completed a WindowBlind yet. I’ve played with a bunch of designs and tweaked this and that. I’ve got some ideas in my mind on what I want to do I just have to get them put into pixels. I want to be sure that the first WB I do is the best I can do at that time and you can bet it will be quality. The crew over at MaxStyles will be sure of that.
In the end, I’ve made some good friends in the skinning world and my desktop has never looked sweeter. I’ll be around for awhile. Skinning something, you can be sure of that.
