What makes a good skin?

[Mikester101]

Just curious...

In looking around at the numerous places for Rainmeter fans to post their creations, I was wondering what makes some skins so popular vs. what makes others not so popular.

It is obvious that personal preference comes into play here and cannot really be accounted for overall but if you were to describe the "perfect" skin, what would you list?

[Alex2539]

A skin is usually first judged on its aesthetics. After all, if you're going to stare at this thing all day, it damn well better look good. After that, I'd say the originality of the skin would come into question. Given a dozen different skins that show the same information, odds are 75% off them will show it in almost exactly the same way. If a skin displays its information in a way that's intriguing, but not overly complex it's going to get more looks than most. That's why clocks are so popular - there are a million and one ways to show the time, you just need to pick one. Finally you would consider the functionality. If the skin doesn't do anything useful, then why bother with it? It has to provide relevant information in a convenient manner.

[Dave_W]

For me, the key thing is to display information in an unobtrusive fashion so that you can keep it visible at all times. I've used several setups, and as soon as I get into having to minimise windows in order to see the information that I want to see...it's just not something that I end up using, no matter how pretty it is.

That's why I think the sidebars/topbars/taskbars are so prevalent - they are designed to display a lot more information than you will get from your standard Windows setup, but in a way that allows you to keep it visible at-a-glance at all times.

So for my money things like Bluevision and Omnimo...yeah, they have that instant wow factor and they really do knock your socks off - but in terms of actually using them on a long-term basis, for me they tend to fall by the wayside while things like Enigma get used over and over.

[poiru]

Simply put, you got to have the eye-candy without sacrificing functionality. That's what makes a good skin. And a mind-boggling preview wallpaper won't do no harm.

[jsmorley]

Eye candy is in the eye of the beholder of course. I have a "minimalist" bent myself. I like skins to give me the information I want readily available, but not get all up in my grill. I prefer a skin that "fits" with any wallpaper and windows scheme, rather than having to fit everything else to the skin. I also agree with Dave_W that for me at least, skins which use a sidebar / topbar / bottombar approach work best. If I have to minimize or WIN-D to get to the information I want, then a skin is gone about five minutes after I load it and say "gosh, that's cool looking".

[Mikester101]

Alrighty then... thanks for the input so far. I have become quite intrigued by the whole design process and instead of going around and around with the "same thing, different day" approach, I thought I'd come to the source and see what's what.

Off the to the drawing board :0)