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

Complete is good, Imagination is much better

Complete
Attention to detail

But most of all you must like it.

Jafo, what about gray and transparant?

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

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?

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

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."

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.

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.