Hello everyone, this is my first publicly available skin! I've chosen to name it Skin2 because it is technically the second skin I have made (just first public), also I think the name fits with the way I modified the osu!standard logo.
This is an osu!standard only skin as I don't really play the other modes but if this skin goes over well I may expand my horizons.
To craft this skin I have taken inspiration from Aesthetic HD, as well as design cues from Google. Redon was extremely nice and encouraging to me as I was working on this and as it stands I have stolen the hit circle select element (which appears in the song editor) from him, everything is my own creation (minus the hit sounds).
EDIT: Today marks the release of v2.0. This update is bigger and better than all the other updates combined as I decided to remake the ENTIRE skin. There are 2 big reasons behind this choice, they are as follows:
With Google's release of a material design .psd I was able to directly use actual material elements and not approximate recreations.
Compression. This one is big. As osu! is a game I feel performance is one thing that should never be compromised. I don't think the previous versions accomplished this. As someone already stated: "It is somehow laggy though. Weird." there is a reason for this; it was poorly optimized and that is my fault. After figuring this out, while I was remaking every single element in an updated .psd I also partnered with lower bit depth (don't worry, 32 bits is still more than your monitor can display), the .pngs that only have black and white elements were even converted to grayscale. Upon completion of this the final size was less than half of the original. After this I used a lossless .png compression algorithm to further reduce the size. After that I used a metadata scrubber to even further reduce the file size. The result is an incredibly total file size with no loss in quality. The blank .pngs were also compressed to the minimum amount I could get. Then for sound I was able to produce 0 byte .wavs for the blank audio. I didn't want to compress any other sound files as I think their quality is pretty important. You'll see what I mean when you download it, the .osk is only 2.7 megabytes!
As always I'm interested in your feedback. If you noticed something that doesn't look good, or you feel something should be changed please let me know.
IMPORTANT:
I want to point out another thing. If you are using this skin and it still feels weirdly laggy go into the skin folder and delete approachcircle@2x.png and approachcircle.png. I use a thin approach circle with a considerable black outline so that when it passes over similar colors it is still visible. Unfortunately this is an incredibly difficult image for monitors to display, but I never noticed as I use a very fast 144Hz monitor. If you use an extremely common 60Hz monitor and the approach circle looks laggy please remove it.
Changelog
1.0:
-initial release
1.1:
-modified the results screen and attempted to tweak the 100 hit burst color
-removed shadow from score numbers
1.1.1:
-adjusted padding between 2 digit hit circle numbers
-fix 2 misnamed "@2x" elements
1.1.2:
-further adjusted padding between 2 digit hit circle numbers
-adjusted color and shading for hit circle numbers
-added inner shadow on hit circle
-adjusted color and shading for hit bursts
-adjusted cursor size(1.3x used to be what I used, now 1.0x is the equivalent)
-added cursor smoke
1.2:
-hit0 updated
-reversearrow updated
-sectionfail sound effect changed
-sectionpass sound effect changed
-section-fail updated
-section-pass updated
-selection-mod-perfect updated
-selection-mod-suddendeath updated
-spinner-clear updated
1.3:
-selection-mod-cinema updated
-selection-mod-doubletime updated
-selection-mod-easy updated
-selection-mod-flashlight updated
-selection-mod-halftime updated
-selection-mod-hardrock updated
-selection-mod-nofail updated
-selection-mod-relax2 updated
-selection-mod-spunout updated
-selection-mod-target added
-selection-mods(-over) updated
-selection-options(-over) updated
-selection-random(-over) updated
2.0:
-literally everything was remade/changed except sound files.
2.0.1:
-added Gaussian blur as per Quanteck's recommendation (This give a sort of manual pseudo-anti-aliasing reducing jagged edges on round stuff)
-menu-back.png was missing
-replaced selection-mode@2x.png with selection-mode.png
Screenshots (Please forgive imgur's compression, it looks a lot better in person)Song Select
Mod Select
Gameplay Skip Button
Gameplay
Pause Screen
Fail Screen
Results Screen
Spinner