Valiant

[Digimike]

Simply an amazing skin! Superb work

[SLoB]

echo the above, some lovely touches on the animation too!

I do have a few niggles though
a few things that I noticed but does not detract from the skin as a whole

catchment areas for the top vis:
the text valiant needs a white/black fill layer behind it set to 0/1% transparency so that you can click on a block as its possible to click inbetween the holes in the text and not trigger the anim, also on the Xion X too
btw did u get the idea for the water reflection from my Walpha skin? heheh

catchment areas for the top V:
same clickable issue as above

catchment area for play button:
its possible to highlight and trigger some sort of action if your still on the stop or pause buttons

main timer font:
looks great but suffers from non fixed width which just looks odd (would be in any skin), reallly hoping Cliff at some point adds in force fixed width for non fixed width fonts as the font market has approx 80% non fixed widths either that or params to split the timer up so a timercolon can be fixed position

drop shadow:
this skin would really benefit from a drop shadow, i dont believe drop shadows are done to death in any skin and this would really help to re-enforce the depth of the skin and perspective

colour themes:
altho the yellow is pretty striking and there is some use of changing the main background, some alternative colours would really bring the skin out and also make it user customisable to match to users desktops

these points are not meant to be negative, just things that would have made it truly exceptional, it deserved the 1st position in the competition without any doubt

[zeolyte]

thanks... no wonder my cursor is slow on hovering on 'valiant'

about Walpha... I havent downloaded that skin until you mentioned it... I was looking for it here in Xion ... didnt know it was a winamp skin ... I did this water effect alot few years back when I was working on avatars.. I see you like this effect too

about the main timer font, yes fixed width would be nice other than downloading fonts that already have fixed width per character.

I was thinking about colorthemes, but I started to worry about the file size... my aim was to make this less than 4mb... and the color of the animated front shield would have to match too if thats the case since the original color of that is gray and green... I hope the next build would have easy color control over animations as well

I also polished the startup animation a bit... removed the black airbrush thats peeking below the lights... its not really that noticeable if you have dark backgrounds... but I fixed it anyway

I wouldnt have done it without the tutorial on this site and looking at a lot of skins for reference... so a BIG THANK YOU TO YOU ALL!.... Mwah!

When I get more time I will make another new skin