A couple of things that might save you some time and some pet peeves.
- You cannot alter the text shifting when pressing certain buttons.
- If you make your background colors too dark, the skin will be unusable.
- In my opinion, glyphs on title bar buttons make buttons from skin to skin look similiar. How many different ways is there to make an X for the close button using app. 8 x 8 pixels? When people suggest glyphs be added, I say to myself... why? you know which button is which?... heaven forbid you ever have to use a MAC!
- Making your start button smaller than the default /standard 100 pixels wide will allow more space on the taskbar and 100 pixels wide for a button is a bit too much.
- Standard Photoshop beveling tools make your images look like poop.
- Skin the right and left tab images. It looks much more refined when complete.
- For a clean result, always try to use the same text color throughout the skin. Using loud/ tacky colors will ruin the look of a skin.
- Too much transparency is too much transparency.
- The bottom bar content margins are based on your Start Panel's left and right pane margins. You cannot adjust the size of the Vista log off buttons. Trick it out with transparency.
- The favorites menu can't be transparent but the typical drop down menu can be. Make seperate images for those menus.
- The Forward and Back IE7 navigational arrows are a nightmre to skin. We are currently limited as to what we can do due to different icon sizes.
- Use glyphs on buttons when possible to avoid strteching issues on buttons. The new layer fetaure will help alot in this regard.
- You can't change the default blue text in Explorer's Favorite links/ Folder area. Actually alot of programs use blue text (Skinstudio) so medium blue backgrouns often result in a text problem.
- You can't change the default white text on the command bar buttons.
- You can make your window frames as wide as you want. They are completely hidden when maximized so I don't get when people say the frames are too wide.
- Avoid bold text whenever possible. It almost always looks out of place to me.
- They say that tiling images is faster loading than stretching.
- The latest version of Wb seems a little buggy. Don't spend too much time on an issue before asking for help. For all you know, there is a bunch of skinner's struggling through the issue.
- DON"T FORGET TO SKIN THE FLASHING TASKBAR BUTTON. (This one is for me)
- Skin the vertical taskber. More people than you think, use it.
- Don't struggle with a double taskbar issue if you have one. Make a substyle for double taskbar is necessary. conpromising the design isn't recommended.
- If you are going to use a windows flag on the start button, please rethink your decision.
- Skinning after doing tequila shots isn't recommended. The next morning you will have to undo everything you did the night before. Skinning on shrooms is highly recommended!
.... bathroom break (these are critical to skinning).
