This was one of the skins from our studio sessions, while we were also working with the Trillian skin for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Trillian FAQ and the Oxymoron skin, obviously. (like Radiohead working on Kid A and Amnesiac at the same time...)
We received no salaries for all these. hehe doesnt matter.
Our aim of the design is...
1. Make Trillian Look Professional:
I hope (I hope...) Trillian can be one of the prettiest prorgrams on your desktops, apart from Sonique, WinAMP and Windows Media Player, which happens to be all media playing softwares. As there is a "Skin" feature in Trillian, there's no reason why Trillian has to look ugly. And therefore, I hope Trillian, by a new and professional-looking skin, can attract new users quickly in the next release.
It's not pixelism. It's not Aqua. It's not really Luna (although color is). It's not plastic. It's not glass. It's not metallic. It's not imitating any material. It's not imitating any kind of mechanical stuffs... mmm, it's just a nice window.
2. Make Trillian Look Original:
Trillian Professional gathers new ideas and old ideas. New ideas are... argh, something new, ok, something new. Old ideas are the previous three skins designed by Trillian by Ryan Saghir - Trillian Original, Trillian Business Skin and Trillian Default Skin... If you look at some parts of Trillian Professional carefully, you may find a lot of elements from the three old skins!
It is completely original. All Icons (even the medium icons), all windows and everything everything were created from the ground up, no matter by means of process, by means of ideas and concepts, and by means of techniques. 100% Trillian, 50% Kid. It's not composed of any themes - It's not about anything. It's completely abstract - It doesn't have any distinct meanings yet. Therefore, I can say, as the designer, that this new design is: Trillian.
The tint of blue is Cerulean Blue(s)... It's not Windows XP's toy blue.
3. Make Trillian Look Integrated:
I researched on the skinnable programs listed in Deviantart, except those completely change your UI (e.g. Litestep, WindowBlinds). Most users like to use skins that suit their desktop. Therefore, we can see that there are lots of 'rips' (refer to JG's essay) for Trillian to suit their WindowBlinds or LiteStep. However, actually most users in the world share the common Windows interface - Blue Bar Top and Grey Window.
So the devil asked me to make something completely outlandish: Dye its hair, pierce and make it punk! But the angel also told me to make something that lets Trillian live happily with other windows ever after - yet retains Trillian's originality. Oh my dear Angel Piccadilly, well, I trusted you and so I made this one. It's very Windows-ish, yet also very Trillian-ish!
Technically...
1. It's basically everything I invented and discovered during these months of skinning for Trillian... You know, interesting ways to place medium-icons, The blinking Transfer Icon... well, these techniques are now applied by many Trillian skinners today.
2. It looks big, right? But actually you don't need a high resolution to use it. My 800x600 fits Trilly well.
I find it fits Windows XP really well. Surprisingly it fits Windows 2000 and Windows ME, too!!!
And you can use 640x480, too!!!
3. Created with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Sliced and Exported with Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Scripted with Notepad... ok? :S
4. The skin is not fully compressed yet due to lack of time, so it's pretty large. It's in the progress... next build
for sure it has to be optimized... now the memory consumption is quite high.
5. Many things are reserved to be completed in 0.64 as there are several skin bugs in 0.6351. They are:
- Drawer may collapse to zero if you resize it. "Minx" for drawer is needed.
- Toolbar shows only one buttons. I reserved a vertical space for a vertical toolbar... as Kevin said that it will be supported in 0.64... mmm
- A bug in the scrollbar. cant fix this still for days...
- Big bug in emoticons. cant fix this still for days... makes me so nervous...
(I know this makes the skin incomplete... but it's the deadline and i cant fix the bug... so let's go for the Microsoft way!!!!)
6. Key Feature: SIX TIMES Full on Region Work! (***Different Regions for Different Windows!!!!***, i.e. it's not just the same-looking corners in every window.) This is probably the most irregular sized set of windows for Trillian.
7. Do you wonder why all those icons and regions were programmed in one line with tabs? (Check out Advanced Skinning Tutorial in future. )
Thoughts...
I havent really decided what the DCC Window should look like... I always think that it should be one of the drawers... but it isn't. I divided types of windows in Trillian clearly by color... only DCC window remains a bit ambivalent.
I'll change the look of the Contact List very probably, too.
Does it look like Windows Media Player 8's Professional skin?
...mmm! I just saw it!! in some sense, kind of... maybe because its designer sets similar aims for WMP. Well, Trillian Professional looks much better, doesn't it?! ... so WMP and Trillian can live happily together ever after! xp
If you try the best you can, If you try the best you cant, The best you cant is good enough~
I really like the ICQTrillian skin to be bundled with Trillian 0.64. (Me votes... ) I can't decide what other skins to be included though... so many.
(Uploaded on 8 July 2001, Updated on 17 July 2001) To be fair in the contest, please use the 8 July build. But to be fair to the users, please download the most recent version.
Skin updated on 17 August 2001 with the most recent emoticon set (16x16). Thanks folio!
This time I did the graphics in Illustrator, changing colour scheme will be quicker (hopefully). I'll make different flavors once the thing is mature... Colours in my mind to be made for Trillian Professional are: Orange, Metallic, Red.
Well, for now, instead of worrying about what it doesn't have, a simly small button for the tab which one could grab and drag or double click would solve the imediate problem.
Problem is: Close the drawer fully via any means, and the drawer will be 0 for what every skin you decide to use after the use of Professional. Which means, modifying the ini file to get it back. Either that or just don't close the drawer fully ever, but someone is bound to close it and not realise that it's ment to be kept open.
I do like this skin, just personally wish for a version without blue. Also wish the scrollbars were fixed properly, would complete it as I said earlier.
Other than that, I think the drawer's mouseovers/hovers need to be a different colour, a blue perhaps like the buddylists mouse over.
But all that aside, this skin rocks. If all bugs were fixed, I think it'd be a definate must to be embedded with 0.64, but with the bugs, I can see it'll cause some heartache for new ppl downloading trillian 0.64, switching to the Professional skin and then having problems, just MHO.
Definately a skin to spend the extra time and fix up completely Kid. It's well worth it.
ar..... you know i did quite a lot of insane experiments on drawers and main window... (and none of them works really well). The main reason is that Drawer doesn't have "Min-X"....
fixing... fixing...
(but would updates allowed in the contest?)
My vote is for this skin to be packaged with 0.64!
It really needs a tab to pull the drawer back out though, even if the tab is tempory until more complex drawer options come to light. I feel that if it's left like this, it'll annoy many people having to go into their ini file to set the drawer back to a higher number than 0. So, conclusion, tab is needed just for now.
Lastly, scrollbars really do need to be fixed. Would 'complete' the professional feel.
Definately love it, although blue isn't my favourite colours, this skin really does rock and deserves to be imbedded with 0.64 as an alternate default skin.
-Kid
You emoticon problem is solved.
the xml is calling: blablabla.bmp
in that folder, your file is called: blablabla.bmp.bmp
remove the additional .bmp from the file and they'll load up.
Minus the ones we know trilly doesn't yet support
Well, for now, instead of worrying about what it doesn't have, a simly small button for the tab which one could grab and drag or double click would solve the imediate problem.
Problem is: Close the drawer fully via any means, and the drawer will be 0 for what every skin you decide to use after the use of Professional. Which means, modifying the ini file to get it back. Either that or just don't close the drawer fully ever, but someone is bound to close it and not realise that it's ment to be kept open.
I do like this skin, just personally wish for a version without blue. Also wish the scrollbars were fixed properly, would complete it as I said earlier.
Other than that, I think the drawer's mouseovers/hovers need to be a different colour, a blue perhaps like the buddylists mouse over.
But all that aside, this skin rocks. If all bugs were fixed, I think it'd be a definate must to be embedded with 0.64, but with the bugs, I can see it'll cause some heartache for new ppl downloading trillian 0.64, switching to the Professional skin and then having problems, just MHO.
Definately a skin to spend the extra time and fix up completely Kid. It's well worth it.
fixing... fixing...
(but would updates allowed in the contest?)
My vote is for this skin to be packaged with 0.64!
It really needs a tab to pull the drawer back out though, even if the tab is tempory until more complex drawer options come to light. I feel that if it's left like this, it'll annoy many people having to go into their ini file to set the drawer back to a higher number than 0. So, conclusion, tab is needed just for now.
Lastly, scrollbars really do need to be fixed. Would 'complete' the professional feel.
Definately love it, although blue isn't my favourite colours, this skin really does rock and deserves to be imbedded with 0.64 as an alternate default skin.
-Md