So I made some a kind of mini-enciclopedia about how to make a skin/interface/theme for a certain program. In this way maybe I will inspire some experienced designers to make new and improved skins. You’ll learn how to make skins for Winamp, WMP, BSPlayer, VLC, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Opera, Firefox, ICQ, Miranda, Yahoo Messenger. So here it goes…

How to make a Winamp skin

Although Winamp Classic is not that popular anymore some people prefer it because it uses less memory than the Modern one. You will find here how to make a skin for Winamp Classic.

Winamp Modern is of course used by the majority and people will find this more useful than the first tutorial. You will find here how to make a skin for Winamp Modern.

Best Winamp skins can be found here

How to make a Windows Media Player skin

The people at pixel2life made the best Windows Media Player skinning tutorial called The Ultimate Windows Media Player Skinning Guide with numerous paragraphs and elaborate explanations.

Best Windows Media Player skins can be found here

How to make a BSPlayer skin

You can do a skin for BSPlayer in two ways.
1. You can make an archive of the contents of the skin directory and modify the extension from .rar or .zip to .bzs
2. You can use the BSPlayer skin maker which you can download from here.

Best BSPlayer skins can be found here

How to make a VLC Player skin

The full documentation about making a VLC skin can be found on the videolan forum and they even give a program to ease your work.

How to make a Sony Ericsson theme

For this you can use the Sony Ericsson Theme Creator which you can find on Softpedia. This program supports all Sony Ericsson phones that support themes (except P900). Sony Ericsson has the most reachable skin maker for mobile phones themes.

Best Sony Ericsson themes can be found here

How to make a Nokia theme

For Nokia you have a similar program of different versions. It would be useful for you the Nokia Series 40 Theme Studio 2.2 or the Carbide.ui 3.2 Theme Edition

Best Nokia themes can be found here

How to make a Motorola theme

Fearsim has made a Motorola theme tutorial which is quite well explained and he also gives good screenshots.

Best Motorola themes can be found here

How to make an Opera skin

Took me some time to find this on their site. Probably they’re hiding it from the pesky skinners. :o Don’t worry, the tutorial of How to make an Opera skin is very easy to understand.

Best Opera skins can be found here

How to make a Firefox skin

It is wonderfull that mozilla.org offers the documentation offers step by step information about How to make a Firefox skin.

Best Firefox skins can be found here

How to make an ICQ skin

If you look at this post in the ICQ forums it seems pretty easy to skin this kind of Instant Messenger-> How to make a skin for ICQ

Best ICQ skins can be found here

How to make a Miranda skin

If you want to learn How to make a Miranda skin you can find it on the Miranda forums were it is explained from A to Z.

Best Miranda skins can be found here

How to make a Yahoo Messenger skin

It is preferably to edit the graphics yourself and also the xml. I don’t recommend using a so called YM skin maker because your result won’t be satisfying. You can try iSkin, probably the best YM 8 skin in the world or Dakside YM 9 skin that has a black and professional touch.