I think this has ended up a good post. Now the Masters, other skinners and not just Windowblinds skinners and good people in general know how much we need and appreciate them. Hey I'm a skinner I made my Avatar.

Definitely not me

Its simple for me, If i couldn't make Master skins, I couldn't keep skinning. I try to contribute other stuff, docks, wallpapers, tiles etc as time allows.

It is nice to see support for our work and it is always appreciated.

I'm not a skinner but I was a systems analyst for software programming optimization (rewriting programs to be smaller, faster and more user friendly) for a number of years so I have some appreciation of the effort involved in producing a master skin. Whew, that was a mouthful. I have bought several master skins and I enjoy the aesthetics but to be fair, only one master skin was without significant problems. The most common problem involves text and background color choices. Twice I suggested the text of something was hard to read and was lambasted about "the skinner has made personal choices as to colors and white on white or black on black IS the design. OK, it's their creation but the buyer should have a right to a refund, for X number of days, in a simple straightforward manner. If the skinner wants a formal "letter of destruction", that's fine too.

Really I applaud the master skinners but let's be fair to the buyers as well. 

that would be a nightmare I imagine, to implement...and open to abuse.....

I think the secret to happy customers....is a very detailed screenshot of as many areas as possible so you can gauge whether it will be right for you or not....

I'm sure if there was an area that you felt was not represented for you to assess...a pm to the skinner would likely give you a screenshot of it for you to make a decision...they're pretty accommodating...

You could always change the fonts/text colors to your liking via SkinStudio, I do it all the time.

I am pissed!!!!!  I had the whole front page, all 5 slots, and someone uploaded a few walls!!!!!   Now all I have is 3 skins on the front page!!

I am being crowded out by common uploaders!!!             

And whatever you do for god sake don't use comic sans!

Poor baby! Sucks to be you!

Am I the only person who understood where the OP was coming from?

Dunno that I agree with it...or the need to segregate payware vs freeware skins....

....but I know where he's coming from....;)

So...what your saying is...you live in the same neighborhood?

I understand where he's coming from, I also understand where he's going. But Masters have worked hard to become Masters, honing skills, giving years of work away for free, not to mention being great assets to the community. They deserve to upload at will and have their work on the front page in the main gallery along with the rest of us.

If there was a gallery of only master skins, and they all went there, Masters wouldn't get the exposure they're entitled to, and have worked so hard for. And some of those Masters have only recently become Masters. Where is their incentive to become Masters if their work is set aside where only those seeking to pay for skins will see them? I never set out looking to pay for skins, hell, I'm a cheap skate! But when I see a real good Master Quality skin, if it is true quality, I am enticed to buy it. This would be a loss for the Masters if it were taken away.

As for free skins, yes, there are plenty, but I've seen a fair share of fairly ugly skins come through here in the past year, so I for one love seeing those master quality skins.

No more caffeine for you Jim! 

well I was told that the master skin program was broken, so thats why the backup of master skins, and then the release of them in consession.

and im pretty sure we were told about this? if not......my bad.

some people have this idea that master skinners must make thousands per skin.....nuh uh no way at all, my first cheque was 30 bucks....and thats not a lie. and then the bank had to convert it to australian dollars so i recieved 20 bucks .... so i wouldnt exactly call us money grubbers, far from it.  Hell go to renderosity or daz3d some time, most stuff there is over 10 bucks and can max into the 40's and even 70's.

I think the op should sit down and try to skin a windowblind, then make the icon set that goes with it, and the cursor and the rainlender and the sysmetrix, the object doc, the wallpaper, ect ect ect......its alot of work and the only thing we require is a bit of respect for our status......

and if you still dont get it, refer to my optimus prime comic!

It's always good to know where people are coming from as some people's origins are a bit of a mystery...

I'm reading this from the back seat of my limo. Actually my assistant is reading it to me.

Pour me another glass of wine and read on.....

just an opinion here, but it would seem that some of the master skinners are updating some of their blinds to operate with win7, which also just happens to bring their skins back to the front page and hopefully additional revenue. making a blind for all three operating systems and the testing involved seems extreme, but...

I appreciate master skinner's blinds, they do provide a variety of interesting graphics to draw inspiration from. this was especially true when I first started out skinning, seeing something that was unique and saying to myself, "I wonder how that was made", and then making it. many of them set the bar for achievement.

should the master skins be separate from the free skins, sure, only if you want minimize their exposure. then they would be like other products that are sold here or better yet like subscriber skins. I've looked at subscriber skins once, can't tell you the last time that I looked at what stardock was selling (ads are autojunked) and I've only bought one master skin and that was years ago.

personally, I like the competition.

Maybe u bought u the wrong ones

I cant imagine any Master skinner saying black text on black bg was on purpose unless there was no way around it.

  A refund on something u cannot return would just lead to abuse I reckon.

Master skin uploading was broke for about 2 weeks or so.  During that time there were about 4-5 Master skins that were backlogged because of it.  That is one reason so many came in within a week.  I could have elected to release only one per week, but I chose not to as that is not fair to the skinners nor the people would are interested in the skins.

This is what I see this morning, and I really don't see a problem here.  If you are a subscriber you can display up to 60 skins per page, so you won't have to see so many Master Skins.

Neil is slowly but surely removing any barriers to having to put up with text ending up unreadable...but it does still happen...all areas of skinning are not yet under complete control.

vStyler is correct...I cant imagine ANY master saying unreadable text was by design...sometimes its unavoidable due to the limitations of dark skin design...or just some unseen aberration of the OS.

I have often encountered places in windows where the same text color is used over light,dark and medium backgrounds...try skinning your way around that without some compromises in pure readability.

Now if all you want is nothing but lite baby blue skins and white backgrounds we gotcha covered...cant see sales being very good after the first 2 or 3 tho.

Speaking of sales...money grubbers?...geez. I am disabled...this is it for me,I'm lucky to be able to scrape out a skin here and there to make a few bucks on.NONE of them have earned what they were worth in effort to make yet.

We are at the end of the quarter and I just passed 250$...yup,I'm rolling in dough man.

IR, At this pace that would be $1,000 for the year. What the hell are you going to do with all that?

Karen, Thank you.

So I guess you can afford that Penthouse I've been hearing about now huh! Man....some people just have all the luck!

Lets also not forget that in addition the Master Skin scheme is provided by Stardock to help pay for the WC website, so you are not only supporting the skinner, but also helping fund this website.

On the original topic I think that it's simpler to group WindoBlinds skins together - master or not. There really aren't many Master skins compared to free skins, although I expect they may become more prevalent than they have in the past. And I expect that the ratio of Master skinners to no-master skinners is very low. Maybe they are more prolific?

The only real difference from the general punter's point of view is "free or not free". If there wasn't a scheme to sell them, then they would just be in the list along with all the others. Segregating them will just mean they won't get looked at.

Interestingly I got an email from someone this week disappointed that they couldn't buy my master skin because they were too young to have a credit card... so would I please just send it them for free. I haven't decided how to reply to that one yet...

(Ess gets back onto his personal yacht and tells his Umpa Lumpas to feed more caviar to his pet unicorns.)