Origin: Part 1 (1998-2003)

Has it really been 20 years? I guess it does feel like 7,372 days (at the time of this post) have past since I started The Skins Factory. To understand the time period Skins Factory was “born” into - in the year 2000, we saw the introduction of the first camera phone, YouTube was 5 years away from launching and Wikipedia would launch literally one year later than we did. So in celebration of our two decades long journey into the wonderful world of user interface design, here is a very truncated look back on how The Skins Factory was formed, and then how we would spend the next 20 years, not pushing the envelope, but shredding it.

If you had Windows Vista or Windows 7 sitting on your home or office PC, or on a laptop on a beach somewhere, you had The Skins Factory’s work on your computer. Our work in the form of Windows Media Player skins and a Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget were sitting on the PCs of over 1 billion users worldwide.

January 7, 2003 - Microsoft launched Windows Media Player 9 Series. Codename: Corona, Designed in 2002 by The Skins Factory.

Bill Gates introduced The Skins Factory designed Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget at Microsoft’s 2005 Professional Developers Conference.

So how did we end up on Windows OS? To know that, you have to travel back seven years to the start of The Skins Factory.

It was on December 18, 2000, that I incorporated the company, bought a domain name and with $6000 in the bank and a credit card, started a boutique UI design studio called The Skins Factory. At the time, the named seemed perfect. Sure I had to explain what a skin was, to just about everyone, and folks hearing the name, thought we were selling dermatology products or worse… adult entertainment, but we were kicking these media player skins out like a factory, so the name was perfectly apropos.

But did it really start there? Not exactly…

The evolution of the skins factory logo

First came Skinwerkz

It actually started 2 years earlier when I met a man who was looking to purchase some computer speakers. I was selling computers in a Circuit City’s SOHO division in Fort Lauderdale. I was completely enamored with skins, from the moment I discovered their existence. Skins, were replacement graphics a user could download and then change the way a software application looked on the outside. It was still the same software, just a different look & feel. My introduction to skins were through digital audio players. They were fun to find, download and use. I ended up putting Sonique (a popular, desktop media player at the time) skins on all the PCs in my store. This was back when some PC boxes had cow spots (Gateway Computers), Sony Trinitron 17” CRT monitors were the “must have” displays, and the Apple iMac G3s were the most beautiful, all-in-one computers in the world, with their saturated colors & ridiculously cool marketing images.

RIdiculously Cool Marketing Images.

One day a man walks into Circuit City and says “I’m the CEO of an MP3 Company and I need some speakers.” Now because Circuit City Sales Associates worked on commission and speakers didn’t pay much (about $1.50 on average), he didn’t garner much attention from the sales team, but as soon as I heard the word “MP3,” I immediately walked over to him.

“Have you ever seen skins?” I asked. He looked puzzled.

So I took him over to the PCs and proceeded to show him a variety of animated Sonique skins and explained how they played MP3 files along with other digital audio formats. He was absolutely blown away and then said the words that would change my life forever…

“These are the coolest things I’ve ever seen! I want you to come work for me.” It was my turn to look puzzled.

The company he ran was called ByteAudio. It was a digital audio startup so new, I was their 2nd employee. We started brainstorming in his living room in Boca Raton, FL about turning skins into marketing tools, and when the angel investment money started flowing in, we moved ByteAudio to a strip mall in Fort Lauderdale and took over a deserted bank. It was small office and my CEO’s desk was setup in the vault, which I always thought rather cool and no… we never locked him in for fun.

I ended up naming the skinning division - SkinWerkz, which I thought had both a digital and industrial sound to it. By the time I joined ByteAudio, I was already heavily involved in the skinning community, so I knew who the top designers were. It would be them, I would end up turning to, for the new skinning division I was starting.

In the late 90’s, skins were uploaded and distributed for free. These were labors of love that designers from around the world, would painstakingly create and then upload as free downloads to the skinning community sites. Download sites like Skinz.org, Customize.org and Deskmod.com were the biggest at the time. DeviantART.com would come along later in 2000, and become the biggest digital art community in the world. We were one of the founding members of the DA community, but I ended up deleting a lot of the work I originally posted, so the earliest post you’ll see will be for an official skin we did in 2007 for game publisher THQ and their game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - which happend to be selected as the Daily Deviation, which was a staff pick.

The first skins we designed, were custom skins for our own brand, which we could then use to show the world what we were capable of delivering.

To understand how cutting edge these were at the time, think about this… Windows 98 had just launched and Apple’s first iPod wouldn’t launch for another 2 years.

Enter Microsoft

In late 1999, I caught wind that Microsoft was going take on the customizable media players like Winamp, K-Jofol, and Sonique, with Windows Media Player 7 - the first version of their media player to allow customizable skins in a proprietary new format called .WMZ. After hearing the news, my CEO & I approached the Digital Media Division at Microsoft about contracting SkinWerkz to design some of the skins for the new version of the player. The other digital media players had large libraries of skins all ready being distributed on their own sites and on the community skinning websites.

It took 4 long months of being absolutely relentless, until Microsoft finally agreed and awarded SkinWekz a contract to design thirty skins to help seed the launch of Windows Media Player 7. I quickly rounded up talent from all over the world. We had designers from the United States, France, Sweden, Finland, and other countries. By the time I was done, 18 skin designers were “brought in” and 6 weeks later we had 30 Windows Media Player 7 skins designed & coded for Microsoft. It was a daunting task, managing 18 different artists, scattered across the globe, all in different time zones for 30 different skins and then getting them all art directed & coded in just 6 weeks. I likened it to herding cats. Managing them & myself, would prepare me for the hectic years to come when I would go off on my own.

Windows Media Player 7 launched on December 12, 2000 and the WindowsMedia.com skin section was filled with SkinWerkz-designed skins ready for download. Our name & brand was all over the website. It was a huge win for a young design studio.

Above: 3 of 30 Skins that were commissioned by Microsoft to help seed the launch of Windows Media Player 7. Designed by SkinWerkz.

Above: The Sentinel. 1 of the 30 Skins. When I left SkinWerkz, I rebranded this skin with The Skins Factory’s name with permission from Microsoft.

My main focus with SkinWerkz was to go after the record labels, and get them to buy into the idea of custom media player skins as a new way to digitally market their recording artists. I was also in charge of overseeing the designing of all skins produced.

Branded skins in my opinion, were the ultimate digital marketing tool as it was always “opt in” by the consumer. The consumer had to voluntarily download & install the skin and then it would sit on the Windows desktop while the user was listening to music or watching a video. It amounted to what was basically an interactive advertisement that the user sought out and embraced willingly.

Once a custom skin was designed, we would then release it on all of the community skinning sites which were getting massive traffic by today’s standards. The labels would then include them for download on their artists’ websites and on multimedia CDs & DVDs. Now remember, we had just designed thirty Windows Media Player 7 skins for Microsoft, so it was a much easier sell to the labels. Because I had such a great relationship with Microsoft’s Windows Media division, it meant we could virtually assure the labels of placement of their skins onto the WindowsMedia.com skin library and in front of millions of users worldwide. The symmetry between the two entities was perfect. Record labels would get their artist-branded skins on a site that was getting millions of visitors interested in digital audio and Microsoft would get new skins from recording artists that would promote their player.

The business relationship I fostered between Microsoft and myself, would end up fueling The Skins Factory’s growth for years to come, as we branched out promoting not only recording artists, but intellectual property for video games, movies, sports and other products & services.

Meanwhile, SkinWerkz started coming up with ideas on how to boost the marketing value of the WMP skins. A logo is great, but Microsoft’s skin coding format was extremely robust - far more than any of the other players. So we began building into the skins, marketing screens, that included album artwork, album credits, photos, lyrics, and web links - including ours. SkinWerkz would end up creating custom skins for recording artsts Creed, Underworld, Mandalay, Deep Blue Something, The Doobie Brothers, and others.

In mid-2000, Warner Bros. Music approached our team about designing a skin for one of their new, up-and-coming bands… Linkin Park. The band’s Hybrid Theory CD had just dropped and the band was out on tour. It just so happened, that Linkin Park was coming to Miami, so Warner Bros. hooked us up with backstage passes and I would end up meeting & pitching Chester Bennington (RIP) and some of the other Linkin Park band members outside backstage at their show on July 23, 2000 at Miami’s Bayfront Amphitheater. I explained to the guys what skins were and what we could do. I remember writing the SkinWerkz URL on a dollar bill and handing it to one of them saying “Check us out. Don’t buy Doritos with this.” I’m pretty sure that dollar was spent, because ultimately nothing ever came of our meeting. If we had been able to visually show the guys the coolness-factor of animated, custom skins, I believe they would have been far more excited by the idea, being digital artists themselves. In hindsight, is it really a good idea to pitch a young band right before they’re ready to go on stage? Nope.

Two years of running SkinWerkz had basically trained & taught me how to run a user interface design studio. There’s no school better than real-world experience and on-the-job training. There really isn’t. Five months after meeting Linkin Park, I would end up leaving ByteAudio and start The Skins Factory.

And so it begins…

It was early December 2000, that ByteAudio started having financial problems. What do you expect when you go to a digital streaming conference in Manhattan and put your team up at the Waldorf Astoria? So after owing me three paychecks, I made the decision to leave ByteAudio. I would end up taking my Microsoft connections with me, the designers, and start my own skin design studio. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this, I literally had $6000 in the bank and a single credit card. It is absolutely frightening, but also exhilarating, to start your own company under those circumstances. You have no financial stability (the truly frightening part), but you’re creating something from nothing and that is always magical. Until you experience it for yourself, you just don’t understand the range of emotions you go through that first year.

I would tell young entrepreneurs this… if you’re not willing to fail, if you’re not willing to put in the 16+ hour days, if you don’t absolutely have an obsessive passion for what you’re doing… don’t bother. I gave up a girlfriend and a steady paycheck working for someone else, to pursue a dream and I loved every single moment of it. When I would pick up the phone or get an email and it was The Walt Disney Company or Target, it was a total rush. Closing a deal with one of them… 10x the rush. Even if we didn’t get the project (we did in both of those cases), just the thought of these enormous companies coming to our little studio, was amazing and validating.

I came up with the name - The Skins Factory, which was a play off of SkinWerkz, bought the domain name, trademarked the wordmark and through the kindness of one of my designers, Lowen, built the first iteration of The Skins Factory’s website. We used all the work we designed while at SkinWerks for the portfolio. We also promoted the fact that Microsoft was our client to anyone who would call and on the website. Microsoft gave a young startup design studio like us major credibility. Meanwhile, Windows Media Player skins had really take off internally at Microsoft, thanks in part to our creative, digital marketing spin on them and the projects started to trickle in.

2001 - About Us:
The Skins Factory is a cutting-edge digital marketing and custom graphic interface company. The Skins Factory, with its global network of artists, boasts some of the top talent in the world in the area of digital graphics and custom skin creation. Opening the doors to innovation in the growing arena of internet and computer marketing, we provide companies and entertainment entities a unique way of self-promotion. Creating customized, replacement digital graphics known as “skins”, our artists can design art that will replace a media player or other “skinnable” application’s default look and feel with one containing your logo, graphics and content creating an exciting new way to promote brand recognition.

In 2001, we were approached by TDK, (the first big brand that wasn’t Microsoft) to redesign the user interface for their TDK Digital MixMaster application, which shipped with TDK’s VeloCD CD burner. Ironically, we ended up doing a port of this interface into the Windows Media Player skin format to promote TDK’s hardware. ZDNet called our UI design: "a spiffy, circular skin".

In 2002, we really started gaining attention when Microsoft featured us as the top link on their WindowsMedia.com skin library page, which was bringing in millions of visitors per month.

Side Note: At one point in the mid 2000s, we were not only featured on Microsoft’s site but on Alienware.com. Traffic to our site was massive. We were burning through terabytes of bandwidth per month from people downloading skins directly from us. Before there was Amazon Alexa telling you the weather report, there was Alexa Internet, a web traffic analysis company (bought by Amazon in 1999) and we were ranked in the 27,000s on Alexa Internet out of 10,000,000+ websites.

Meanwhile internally, Microsoft Project Managers would talk amongst themselves asking who could design skins? We were almost always their top choice. We had a few competitors back then, TattooMedia & SaltMine LLC, come to mind, but none of them could compare with the imagination or quality we were delivering.

By mid-2000, Microsoft was bringing projects to us non-stop. Not only for internal projects, but they were getting big brands to hop on board the custom skin train. Every couple of weeks, a new project would emerge.

As time went on, Microsoft started branching out with new versions of Windows Media Player. One was targeting college students called Windows Party Mode. These were full screen Windows Media Players designed to offer privacy to a user’s desktop while delivering a full screen music playback experience. We designed most of them. One of my favorites was Darkling:

2002 - Darkling Party Mode Skin.

In the middle of 2002, Microsoft had The Skins Factory build skins for the next generation of Windows Media Player - Windows Media Player 9 Series, Codenamed: Corona. We designed the default skin for it which is the first skin I show at the top of the page We named it Quicksilver, due to the mercurial design language we used.

Skeuomorphism at its finest. These actually used real photos of stone & wood which then our designer masked on to the organic shapes he created. We wanted to do something a little more elegant this time around.

January 7, 2003 saw the beginning of the Plus! Digital Media Edition packs from Microsoft. One again, they brought us in to design skins for Windows Media Player 9 Series. We ended working on holiday packs as well. One of my favorites from the Plus! pack was a round, highly reflection set of chromatic skins I ended up calling The Bionic Dot. We did 7 variations so there would be something for everyone. Reflection mapping was used to give Dot a real-world, tactile feeling.

Designed in 2002 - The Bionic Dot for Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition.

Midway through 2003, our brand name recognition was accelerating. Electronic Arts started contracting us to design skins to promote their games Need for Speed Underground, The Sims 2 and a few others. Microsoft was throwing us projects left & right as was XBOX.

Soon Warner Bros. Entertainment came into the picture and before we knew it, we were designing the official Windows Media Player & Windows Party Mode skins to promote Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

A lot of competing skin design studios at the time were doing what we called “picture skins.” These were basically pictures with transport buttons (Play, Stop, Next, Previous, Progress Bar, etc.) on them. Not much imagination went into them. We had a different design methodology. We looked at the intellectual property and designed a skin that would live within the world of that particular IP. This would create symmetry between the property and what we were creating, to deliver a more unified experience. For Terminator 3, we thought “what would a Skynet-derived, T-X Terminator media player look like?” We designed an organic shape for the player and then gave it the same metal as her endoskeleton frame. Here’s a look at some of the final linear comps and the end result.

Warner Bros. would bring us back to design skins for Catwoman, Constantine, Dreamcatcher, The Last Samurai and a few others including Batman Begins.

2003 - The Official Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Windows Media Player skin designed by The Skins Factory for Warner Bros. Entertainment & C2 Pictures.

Other properties we worked on in 2003 included skins for Valve’s Half-Life 2, XBOX games like XSN Sports and the Official XBOX Windows Media Player skin and it’s variant edition for XBOX Live. XBOX also brought us in to design a visual design, proof-of-concept for Xbox.com to inspire their in-house design team.

This top placement on WindowsMedia.com’s skin library was a gateway for us getting user interface design clients outside of doing the traditional Windows Media Player skins. We still designed a ton of WMP skins, but we began to branch out exponentially.

You might be asking yourself, why do end-users coming to your site to download skins matter? A few reasons… one reason being, software developers & project managers liked skins themselves and because people talk. When someone in a company asks “who can we get to design our user interface.” someone would say “Check out The Skins Factory.” Our skins were so popular at one point, I remember walking into a Best Buy and went to go pay for my purchase at the cashier. I pulled out my American Express card and handed it to the cashier who saw the name on it (The Skins Factory) and promptly proclaimed “I know you guys! I’ve downloaded your skins before!” Not going to lie, It felt good.

I’m going to end it here. We’ll pick it back up in the next installment. 2004 would end up being a monumental year for us as a studio, as we branched out doing custom Windows Desktop themes for Disney & Alienware and began working on more traditional user interface design projects, for clients you will most certainly recognize. Hint: One name starts with “Motor” and ends with “ola.” ;-)

Read Part 2.

Thanks for reading. If you need world-class UI/UX design, you know who to turn to. We have been doing this for awhile. Feel free to share this on social media or leave a comment below and tell us what you think. Stay Safe & be well,

Jeff
CEO + Founder of The Skins Factory

A Look Back on 20 Years of The Skins Factory: Part 1

Origin: Part 1 (1998-2003)

The evolution of the skins factory logo

First came Skinwerkz

Enter Microsoft

And so it begins…

THE SKINS FACTORY

The Award-Winning UI/UX & Web Design Agency.

UI/UX Design Blog

A Look Back on 20 Years of The Skins Factory: Part 1

Origin: Part 1 (1998-2003)

The evolution of the skins factory logo

First came Skinwerkz

Enter Microsoft

And so it begins…