Design Evolved Community Forum

.lou i dont think its rude at all, i think its passionate and demonstrates you sticking up for a close friend and colleague. i dont expect to be able to read all willz skinning guides and instantly be as good as him, however i invisioned it along the lines of youll read each guide and gradually try to implement the stuff that willz is teaching as you learn it, as you move from one guide to the next with learning new things as you go you will hopefully start to gain that debugging experience, for example i am still trying to fix thing related to min max close buttons even though willz tuts in the guide was good because as i learned how to do that it inspired me to play about with it and see how far i can take it using my own creative style and that i had to debug my own modifications and can lreearn a lot from that.

my point being no reading the guide will not turn us into willz thats impossible nobody can ever be exactly like willz but through reading the guides i beleive that we can learn all the stuff willz shares with us in them, creatively adapt upon his teachings, debug our own inspired modifications in turn gaining the debugging knowledge and developing our own unique style.

when you learn from a master like willz and are inspired by those teaches to take the idea into a new and experimental way you can potentially become as good as the teacher if not better, yes willz might miss things out and yes he may even intentially not include something, but we can all read between the lines and what 1 skinner does learn from willz another 1 will and thanks to plus forums and these forums we all learn from each other so all help each other fill in the blanks that willz left.

i know i might be getting carried away here, im not saying the result of the above will be like willz but it could make the skins developed equally as good in there own way, ultimately messenger itself can only be skinned so far at any one time eventually even willz will hit the ceiling allowing time for others to catch up.

Finally, a proper discussion!

You make some great points there, and all I really have to say anymore is that it's all possible, but it will take quite some time. So until then, Willz is banned from winning the skin of the month (except this month) .

haha so I am officially disqualified from winning skin of the month on my own site?

Lol man this is happening too much, first the skin contest and now this.

Nah, I was gonna do that next month anyway. From now on the only time I will allow it is if there hasn't been many skins released in that month (as I wouldn't want a bad skin to win just for the sake of winning)

Like lou said before its all a matter of experience, like yeah I've been doing this for a while now and I have had pretty much every single comment thrown at me so I know what people like and don't like. The best thing to do is just keep going at it as over time you will make errors and people will highlight those errors so you will improve as a result of that. The guides is something that I will finish off, but not anytime soon as I am still not calling it quits just yet.

The Open Live skin should be something that will help everyone out, it will put Messenger into a state that is easier to edit so instead of mucking around to set up a skin you can now muck around with something solid and expand on it. I guess only time will tell if this really happens or not.

great stuff guys, yeah i know itll be a wile before anyone comes close to acheiving what willz has already acheived, yes its all a matter of experience on that point i agree, i also think that willz didnt event skinning he must have once been taught by someone in they in turn may be better at skinning than him so if willz can surpass his teacher then surely theres hope for all of us to do the same and one day surpass willz, well maybe thats exagerating a bit but like they say "if you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything" so who knows what the future may hold.

lol, yeah when I started it was nothing how its like today. There weren't any tutorials really (except maybe one or two that just outlined some really basic concepts). The main problem back then was that Messenger was in a transitional state so there was a lot of changes going on fast so by the time a document could be made, it would already be obsolete. Anyway back in my early high school days I played around a bit with visual styles, I made a few very bad ones (hey I was only 14 at the time but still) and saw that it was going no where since I knew I could never match the quality of some of the others (this was before I decided to study multimedia design too btw )

Anyway one day on mess.be I saw that they had news on Messenger skins being released from the original Messenger Lab, I checked out their stuff and loved it. But then Messenger was updated to 7.5 and I was really impatient on their upcoming update. I thought "pfft how hard could this possibly be" and decided to give it a shot.

I didn't ask for much help, all I did was join the forums and just post that I was a new skinner and was working on my own skins in the hopes of possibly working with the Messenger Lab in the future. The visual style making experience helped as the shellstyle.dll's in visual styles used similar UIFILE code to MSN Messenger (no longer the case in WLM). I made my first skin Zero G MSN (no not the one you see today a really bad one), but of course because I had no installer maker I just had to distribute the exe on the forums. It failed miserably in the end, I think it only got 6 downloads overall. Nobody wanted to give it a shot when there were far better skinners out there releasing better stuff.

While it did sort of put me down a bit, at the time I loved what I had made and decided to continue. Then I came across kol's vista theme for xp and like a lot of people began making their desktops look like vista. So I announced that I would be taking a shot at making an Aero based skin for MSN Messenger 7.5. This is the skin I learnt a lot of my tricks from. First I started the skin on my own and started on the sign in window just to get a proof of concept. After posting this I was then getting a lot of interest in the skin. It was then when ipab first contacted me and asked if I wanted to team up. Ipab already had some skinning experience and I thought that it would be best to team up as I knew I could not tackle it alone.

So yeah from that we spent months playing around with Messengers layout, moving elements around to see what could be done, looking at other skins and trying to figure out how a certain effect was done without actually looking into the skin itself. I think we had about 30 different dll's for that skin all up between us both. The best thing we made was the drop down orb (which has become a trademark in all my skins now), it was something that took a while to figure out and perfect but it was worth it. After that skin, well WLM 8 came out and everyone disappeared leaving only a few to go on

Anyway point of that story is to show the sort of stuff I had to go through to get where I am now. While people may think they should give up because there is someone better out there, its really not what should be done. You should try more and you will get better over time. Teaming up with someone is probably one of the best things you can do as you both will discover things quicker.

thanks for sharing that willz, your moral at the end basically reinforces what ive said above that although people like yourself are better skinners in the here and now with time and patience we too can start to acheive wonderful things like you have done. i think your dropdown orb is pretty cool i have tried to go through code of some of your skins to work it out but that still baffles me but like you said i wont give up cause i know one day ill acheive everything i intend to on skinning just like you.