Skin of the Year 2023: Voting Open

Grab yourself a hot cup of cocoa, sit by the fireplace and pick your favourite skins of 2023.

With the new year barely getting started, now is the perfect chance to look back at 2023 and choose the highlights of the year. Let's briefly put our focus on the skinning community and look back at skinning in 2023 — there were lots of interesting things that happened, such as the "Icons of an Era" skinning contest, 2 new skinning GMT's being elected (congrats to Roan and Redo_!), and skinning changes were made to both osu!(stable) and osu!(lazer).

Namely, an osu!(stable) update in late October added skinning support for some song select components, which are now being implemented in both new and older skins released during the year. Furthermore, osu!(lazer) received various new dynamic skinning elements throughout the year, a recent example being a dynamic player name element that changes depending on whether you are playing, spectating someone or watching a replay. A BBCode update also allowed for imagemaps to easily be added across the website, which aided skinners in more easily creating clickable banners that are often used to showcase their skins on the forum.

Now that we've had a brief glimpse into what's been happening over the past year, let's quickly go over the contest details.

Voting details

All skins that have been released during 2023 and have been added to the compendium are eligible to compete, including contest and podium entries. Everyone gets 15 votes each to cast, and you can spend as many or as few as you like.

The top 3 entries will all receive a unique profile badge based on their entry along with 4, 3 and 2 months of osu!supporter respectively. Entries #4–10 will all receive a month of osu!supporter each.

This year we had 269 skins that have been submitted to the skinning forums, 123 of them being added to the compendium. We highly suggest you get to some light browsing and check out the submitted skins, and you might find a new skin you will be able to call your "main".

Click here to get involved and vote for 2023's Skin of the Year!

The voting will remain open for 14 days after this post goes up, closing on the 28th. Hopefully, that should be enough time to go through the catalogue and pick your favourites.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the compendium in 2023, and good luck!

—skinship