Gallery Highlight: Issue 1: `l-courni !

`l-courni has been around since the middle of 2001, and been an indispensable asset to the community as long as I can remember. Almost 3 years later and he's still going stronger than ever, serving the skinning community in valuable and inspirational ways. With some of the sickest skins for a variety of programs, `l-courni contributes in every way possible.

I remember downloading l-courni's Stand I skin for Sysmeter, and this advanced update applies an even more extreme sense of his great style. One reason I picked this skin was because it demonstrates l-courni's unique, non-conforming style of skinning, while still being such a great, sleak, design.	Alien Egg for Coolplayer is a skin that just speaks a novel's worth of a story. Skins are made to look damned good, but not many look good and have such depth in their theme that your imagination is set into works thinking what technology bred such a sick design as this egg-like pod. Currently there's a work in progress on an advanced update to this skin http://www.deviantart.com/view/1075626/ for Winamp 3/5 and his graphics update is looking awesome. I think we all should help support this and hopefully prod him enough to finish that skin up, as all he needs is a coder!
Winamp Classic is the target of many skinners because it doesn't require a lot of the more complicated and extensive coding that some other skins do. French Design, here, though goes beyond the normal average skinners abilities, and displays l-courni's real sense of style, rather than trying to blind someone with flashy intrusive or confusing graphics. Functional and beautiful, while seeming like a real object, a little more current as opposed to the futuristic Alien Egg skins.	Denonium has many of the similar elements as French Design, and I just can't decide which I liked more, so I put both on here. This skin, as well, shows off great style and design. Functional and not so extreme that you can't integrate it with other desktop skins you may wish to couple this with for a great theme.

When I asked `l-courni to give me some of his specific goals on the projects he's done around the skinning community, such as the Skin Community Modblog, the Skin Mosaic, etc, he replied with a detailed interview all on his own! I couldn't have written this better, myself, so the following is `l-courni's replies to me, exactly:

My name is Laurent I'm french and I'm 26 years old. My involvement with the online art scene started in the skin community. As I discovered the skin scene via deviantART you could say I'm a pure deviantART skinner.

That was 3 years ago and I came here while searching some more skins from `starvingartist after I fell in love with his cold mettle ICQ skin. As soon as I discovered the skin community I wanted to try it and become a skinner myself.

At that time, skinning was only starting to get popular but there were alot of friends to be made and already alot of apps to skin.

After releasing some skins, working on some collabs and website layouts, I started to think the community needed something to join effort for, a fun project to make us all meet, I thought that would be neat...and there it was, deviantART was lauching the mosaics system !

I came up with the ~theskinmosaic project and invited a bunch of DA skinners. 3 skin mosaics were made when DAv3 signed the end of the mosaics. I was really happy with the result, it is what I consider my main achievement in the community, bringing so much talented skinners together. It an experience I'll gadly run again if the mosaics come back.

After that, I was mainly focusing on my school studies as I was finishing my 6 years in French architecture school of Toulouse.

Sometime before my diploma I discovered Modblog and considering I had no more time to skin something else than work in progress that would never make it to a finished skin, I thought of supporting my fellow skinners by running a skin scene blog that was aimed at giving highlight of their work. I featured 3 skinners already, interviewing them and giving them the hand on the blog's skin to show of their talent.

Those interviews were later published on deviantART as a part of an effort to add more content to the "skin & theme" gallery. I believe strongly in a user/skinner increased involvement as a kick to the skin scene that isn't as fun as it can possibly get.

I might not be your average leet skinner, I almost never release a complete usable skin but, hey, skinning is one of my best way to chill out and the community around it is part of the reason.