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newest skin
November 20, 2007
Baccano!
November 10, 2007 Final Fantasy X-2
November 8, 2007 Fruits Basket
November 6, 2007 Saint Seiya
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history
Exquisite began construction around late April - early May of 2005. The owners -- that's us! -- Sora and Chisato, have been getting into winamp skinning. Chisato especially became rather addicted to it. It only made sense that a winamp skin site would spring up sooner or later. It was a joint project between the two because it seemed silly to run two separate winamp sites on the same server. Plus, we're good friends!
Past visitors will probably remember when Exquisite was actually called Heavenly6.net and hosted on Chisato's old --and dead-- domain. However, after the domain expired, we lugged the site over to the new domain, Fruit-Candy.net. The domain was originally a joint domain collective between Sora, our friend Aimee and I, but that plan quickly fell through. This winamp skins site was placed in the subdirectory /skins -- we didn't think the site would become that big.We sat around for a day thinking up of a name for the site, but to no avail. Sora insisted she will be fine with whatever crappy name Chisato thinks up of, so the site ended up being named Exquisite.
Sora did most, if not all, of the coding. In the mere beginning, there were only fifteen or so skins (currently we have around 200 skins or so --this number updated Seot 2006--). The first categories (and thus, the oldest skins on the site) are Chobits, DN Angel, Full Moon, Puchimon, Shinshi Doumei Cross and the celebrity categories (oldest skins on the bottom of each page). We do "skin clean ups" occasionally, removing old skins we feel are not up to our own standards, in order to make sure Exquisite has the best skins possible. That, and they bother us.
skinning
When it comes to skinning, you probably have noticed that there are a number of buttons that are usually hidden, or rarely skinned, namely the balance bar, mono/stereo, shuffle/repeat, eject, and eq/pl. The entire Equalizer window is often covered by the image.
In our defense of our slightly non-functional skins, mono/stereo don't even work (not on Winamp 5 anyway, which is what we use), there is really little use of the balance bar as we are sure most people prefer to have their music coming out in equal amounts in both speakers, people rarely insert CDs into their computers anymore to listen to music (hence the hidden eject button) and eq/pl as well as shuffle/repeat are easily accessibly by right-clicking anywhere on the skin.
As for the equalizer window, most of the time it's simply covered up. We personally don't use the equalizer window and we are sure not very many people use it either. Some people like it to be functional just for a functional skin, but they don't actually use it either. It is occasionally skinned, because it's true that it does look good on the skin sometimes. Most media players don't have equalizers anyway, you won't miss it.
To skin anime pictures onto winamp and keep it functional while making the skin look good is actually very hard. If we didn't sacrifice some of the buttons, they will end up covering characters' faces or simply making the skin look cluttered and terrible. If you will look on Winamp Classic default skin, nearly every square inch of it is taken up by a button. It's hard to please everyone -- some people would rather we skin all the buttons, while some like our style the way it is, so we often try to provide two versions of one skin.
We like to keep our skins rather simplistic, so you won't notice any extravagant patterns or extremely cluttered skins (much). Especially with the playlists, we tend to keep it simple. Actually, because of this, we believe we have created a set style for ourselves, and we really hope you like it. And of course, Chisato and Sora each have their own individual styles of skinning as well -- one of the fun games is to get someone to try to guess who made which skin without cheating by looking at the readme file.
skin makers
As you probably know by now, the skins on this site are created by Chisato and Sora (Chisato does a majority of the skinning). We did not create any of the art. Obviously, we are fans of manga and anime, as well as a number of celebrities and video games. As this is our site, we like to skin things that interest us, so don't be surprised if new, random categories spring up from time to time. We do try to keep anime and manga the main focus of the site though.
Please don't assume you know which anime/manga series are our favourites simply by the number of skins we have made for the series. While this theory may be true for a select number of series -- for example, the sheer number of skins in the Bleach and Gundam SEED categories really prove we love the series! -- there are many series that we love that only have a couple skins in it. The best example is probably the Hana Yori Dango section -- Chisato loves Hana Yori Dango but alas, there is only one skin in that section. Vice versa, some series we have skinned tons of winamp skins for, but we aren't even big fans of the series! A good example of this is the Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles series -- actually, only Chisato reads this series and for some reason, skinned a lot of skins of it, even though she is not really a fan. She likes it, but she wouldn't call herself a fan.
Maybe we'll tell you our favourite series later ... ?
The Layouts
The layouts on this site are made by either Chisato or Sora. The Parfait Tic theme is by Chisato. Brush/pattern/image/resource credits go to:
