SkinStudio - Create Unique Visual Styles for the Windows Interface

Introduction

SkinStudio^™ is a program that allows users to create visual styles for Windows 10 / 8 / 7. These visual styles are applied by the popular GUI skinning program, WindowBlinds. A fully complete visual style will change the title bars, borders, push buttons, scrollbars, Start bar, Start menu, and virtually every other part of the Windows GUI.

The new version of SkinStudio is designed to make it much easier for new users to get into skinning. Skinners can change as much or little of the GUI as they choose and SkinStudio will fill in the rest for them. A new skin can take a matter of minutes or weeks depending on how sophisticated the skin is.

A Tour of SkinStudio

Task-oriented Design

SkinStudio takes on a much more task-oriented design. Rather than the user being overwhelmed with information by seeing all elements of the visual style at once, SkinStudio instead takes the user step by step through the skin.

Clean Interface

Each element shows either (or both) a Windows XP logo or a Windows Vista logo to let the skin author know which features are supported under which operating system. Moreover, when editing a particular element, the interface is clean and to the point.

Customization Wiki

Moreover, each section will be tied to a particular part of the SkinStudio portion of the Customization Wiki. In this way, users can instantly get help making skins from not just Stardock but the entire skinning community.

New Features

One of the most common complaints about WindowBlinds skins is that many skins didn't support many of the features. This was often because the previous SkinStudio was designed at at time when WindowBlinds was much simpler and as more features were added, the newer features began to get buried in the UI. The new SkinStudio design makes these new features much more accessible.