In 2002 we had the GUI Olympics. It was a contest to see who could create the best user interface designs for the Windows GUI. The tool used was WindowBlinds to apply them.  The contest was a huge success. Something over 100 skins were submitted.  But while the contest was a huge hit, running it was an absolute nightmare. The politics behind the scenes nearly brought it all to a screeching halt.

The near-disaster should have been easy for us to predict but we were a bit naive on such things.  You see, the contest was an inter-site contest. That is, each of the major skin sites had a judge. The gotcha was that the skinners had to choose to represent one of these sites. And the money ($10k in cash/prizes were given out) from this contest was split between the author and the site. So you can see the problem - the people judging actually had a potential financial conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, add to that the classic issue of who is in charge? Stardock, who sponsored it, felt it should have the final say since it was providing the prizes, running the website, and running the day to day contest. But some of the smaller sites felt that they should have an equal say in every decision. This included requests for post-facto changes to the rules. At one point, a group of the smaller sites banded together and demanded that none of the judges be appointed by Stardock. This would have essentially meant that the only ones who could judge the contest were those who had a financial stake in the outcome.  Stardock rejected this and two skin sites dropped out of the contest.

The net result was that a couple "Teams" dominated the entire contest (deviantART and LotsOfSkins). To spectators and contestants, this was no big deal. You really only need 2 reasonably equal contenders to make it an exciting competition. And in the end, deviantART won 18 medals, LotsOfSkins won 10 mdeals, and VelocityArt 9 medals. So despite some half-baked ideas on how to run the contest, it all worked out well and people have been asking for a new GUI Olympics ever since.

How times have changed...

It was 2 years ago this April that the last GUI Olympics was finished.  And so here we are again, 2 years later and things have changed remarkably since then.  For one thing, back then there was an ongoing battle between the "old guard" of "community leaders" of skinning who had wanted to keep skinning a small, private hobby. As one of them put it at the time, "This is our scene, we created it, we don't want it turned into some mass-market, would you like fries with your happy meal phenomenon!".  And on the other side, there was the "new guard" whose response would have been "Yea, we want skinning and customization to be a mass-market, everyone and their brother should be trying it out."  And so behind the scenes this battle was waged. The old guard has since faded away as skinning became mainstream.

Where skinning was a tiny niche hobbyist thing before, it has grown and grown. Three "new guard" sites: WinCustomize, deviantART, and Neowin have grown massively in terms of number of users.  deviantART, in fact, moved beyond merely spreading skinning to the masses to helping make art itself something that everyone could take a shot at. And for good and ill, these two sites now get over 6 million unique visitors per month between them -- more than all the other sites in the "community" combined.

And Neowin went from being a niche tech site to being possibly the world's most popular technology forum. It has become not just a hub for skinning but one that has opened up customization to the average users. In terms of actual quality skin creation, it has become immensely popular and likely to be a real force this time around. If there were any old guard people still active, they would say that WinCustomize, deviantART, and Neowin have let in the "riff raff" in which mediocrity prevails, originality quashed and skinners focused on making popular skins and themes rather than new and fresh ones.

But no matter how you slice it, the times have dramatically changed.  Skinning has become mass market. Look at the table above and the stats make it clear.  The rankings of every customization-related site that was involved in the GUI Olympics 2002 has dramatically improved except for Teknidermy which was, at the time, the core old guard center of things.

Skinning as a niche is gone, it's mainstream now. Countless programs these days are coming skinned. Microsoft made Windows XP be skinnable to a degree. Longhorn boasts of having all kinds of new customization features in the pipeline.  Stardock is making almost as much selling DirectSkin at $10k a pop to companies to skin their applications as it does selling WindowBlinds to end users for $19.95 a piece.  Skin authors themselves are now making thousands of dollars annually making professional skins. The recent Zippo Lighter Suite is just one example. Professional skin authors have made skins used by Microsoft, ATI, nVidia, Nintendo, and countless other companies. Another reason why this would be a good opportunity for someone to try their hand at skinning using industry accepted standards like WindowBlinds.

And so it makes sense that the GUI Olympics 2004 would expand too. Expand and be run fundamentally differently...

GUI Olympics 2004 concepts

This time around, skinners will be able to form their own teams. They don't have to represent any particular site (though they can).  The winning team will get a $500 bonus prize. A team can be merely a group of guys with no particular affiliation other than each other. They just have to create a logo and form a team. When the GUI Olympics gets going in March, contestants will be able to create and join teams.  Teams can be websites. They just don't have to be this time around.

There will be 3 categories this time:

1. Visual Styles (must be provided in WindowBlinds format)

2. Icon Packages (IconPackager format)

3. A MP3 player (to be announced soon)

There will be 6 judges.  4 appointed by Stardock and 2 appointed by the company that sponsors the third category.. Of the 4 appointed by Stardock, 1 will be Paul Boyer, who works at Stardock now and is considered the leading Windows icon author (since he can't compete in the icon creation portion it makes sense to have him judge). Another will be Kris Kwilas who has been a GUI expert for nearly a decade.  The other two judges from Stardock will come from the community.

In addition, there will be 3 moderators. Think American Idol. These 3 moderators will weed out skins, icons, and player skins that don't have a chance to keep the final total reasonable. It just means a skin or set of icons that contains ripped material or is incomplete or is just plain terrible won't be allowed in. The moderators won't be judges though, they just get to give a yay or nay to the submissions as they come in.

All skins and icons must be new. They can't be something that's existed on any other site previously. They also must be exclusive to the GUI Olympics (i.e. you can't go uploading them around the net). Once the contest is officially started (early March) there will be approximately one month of submissions before the various events even begin to be judged so there will be plenty of time to put together the skins and/or icons. 

We expect each category to have between 3 and 5 events. 

The visual style events will include: Best OS-like skin (not an OS skin, but an original OS concept that one would say "Now that would be a good OS skin!".  Most Creative Skin (that is, one that doesn't look like every other skin ever made out there but still looks nice).  Most Minimalistic Skin. Best PowerUser Skin.  Best Overall Skin.

The Icon packages one would be: Best OS-like icons  (see above). Most Original Icons.  Best overall Icons.

The MP3 player categories will be influenced by the sponsor but are likely to be: Most Creative Skin.  Best PowerUser skin.  Best Overall Skin.

Plus one final event: Best overall submission.

Additional Awards: Most Valuable Player and Winning Team

Overall, we're looking at 12 events.  12 events competing for $10,000 cash and prizes. Prizes will include hardware, software, shirts, and possibly trophies (we're looking into that).

Each major customization site will be able to have a flag posted on the top of the GUIOlympics.com page in exchange for the GUI Olympics logo being put prominently on their site during the the contest.

The Next Step

The contest will get officially announced soon. We just have to make sure things are set for the third category (it's a large company) as well as get prize sponsors all together. But this is a head's up of what is coming. 

But for those who do feel that skinning has become so mainstream that skinners now top themselves in seeing who can create the most mild looking skins out there, this is an opportunity to stretch your talents out. The most "Creative" skin is unlikely to go to someone making a "Luna-like" visual style (WindowBlinds supports buttons on the sides and bottom as well as the standard top right position), today's media players are almost infinitely customizable.

It's going to be blast!

Good luck to everyone!