Windows Media Player Skin Fever
Description
A white-background meme says in large black caps: "I'M SO OLD, I REMEMBER THE DAYS WHEN DESIGNERS WERE PAID IN DRUGS." Below it are six bizarre early-2000s media-player skin designs: a green head with speaker ears and "00:00," a purple metallic circular player with "Playlist3," a rust-textured rectangular player labeled "00:00," a blue face-themed player with a playlist, an orange heart-shaped player with playback controls, and a blue cartoon blob player showing "Decellee: Groove Is In the Heart" and "00:01." Most captions read "C:\>_ — Windows ME: Media Player," while one lower-left caption reads "Cerulean' Skin Windows XP Media Player." The joke is nostalgia for the era before flat design and strict design systems, when desktop media players treated UI chrome as a playground for surreal skins, tiny buttons, illegible controls, and maximalist personality.
Comments
18Comment deleted
Before design systems, every media player shipped with six skins and none of them agreed where the play button lived.
Discoverability was zero, but the vibes were hardware-accelerated.
Good old days. Comment deleted
Nah they just had a personality. Nowadays everything is corporate slop Comment deleted
They definitely took inspiration from the 90's quests and RPGs Comment deleted
maybe it’s also the reason everyone was using winamp. WMP was laggy, used a whole lot of screen space and skins were awful Comment deleted
Incidentally winamp skins live on in some open source players Like audacious and xmms but wmp died a long time ago Comment deleted
Nope, still alive and free to use Comment deleted
Who even used Windows ME and the default Media Player? Both were shit Comment deleted
Don't knock ME, it had WMM Comment deleted
Like the OS kinda sucked ass and would break randomly but it otherwise wasn't a bad OS Comment deleted
how could one design this? Comment deleted
Ms paint, Photoshop Comment deleted
I mean probably not with winform ? Comment deleted
Yeah but the initial images are made in Ms paint or Photoshop Comment deleted
winforms wasn't a thing back then, it was MFC, ATL or Win32. You could basically go wild with Win32 Comment deleted
Yeah, win32 is what I remember Comment deleted
Is it reasonable to say that most drugs were paid for Windows ME then?🤔 Comment deleted