how to design vBulletin skins for designers

Actually this thread is intended to be for both designers and coders. I wanted to ask you all what do you think interests designers most of all in vB skin coding and what are the most common difficulties designers face when trying to make a skin. Do they miss bits? Do they miss something else? We need to know what the coders think to help designers improve!

Well, I have a lot of experience in phpBB skinning (none in vB), but I would say designers/coders have trouble making the skin from scratch. I'm a big member at v7n and we see tons of phpBB forums that have the same old phpBB normal skin. Making a design that is truly unique is difficult for a lot of designers.

I think a forum is almost too restricted to skin. It usually has the same setup and setupstyle, which is good for the visitors, cause every forum works about simular. But caused by the the same repeating thing constantly it's very hard to create something original AND goodlooking. If iam being honoust i only saw a forum i like once and i forgot it's name. It was a white one, with some green buttons (maybe rings some bells?)

I've seen and iam active on a lot of forums, such as tweakers, webhostingtalk, webmastertalk, httptalk, yaxay, sitepoint etc. And i never thought 'wow' when visiting one of these popular forums. They look okay, but basicly it's all a bit of the same, exeptions there, but they didn't catch me either.