No offence, but this skin sucks in so many ways.. Design-wise I mean.
First of all, the square is a very hard shape to make something good out of it.. I'd suggest making it a rectangle (horizontal or vertical), maybe even using the golden ratio if you want something more squarish than rectanglish.
Second, contrast and positioning are essencial. To me it looks like you randomly shove the buttons and squares there hoping for it to come out nice. Remember: planning how the design will look in the end and predicting how the users will interact with your UI always helps making better works.
Gray scales + glossy blue is good if you absolutely know how you're gonna use it, but low contrast grey scales are quite hard to pull off (i.e. the space for the news), especially if you're using white as the color for your font. Users will look at it and frown upon the text, never stopping to read your news, even if there's something really important written there, because there isn't enough contrast. Note that by contrast I don't just mean the contrast between the text and the text background, what is outside also counts.
Third.. Round edges. This one is tricky.. Most people will look and think "Well.. It's just an edge, what effect could it possibly have on the overall design" but I'll tell you.. It is a HUGE deal. Edges that have a too big radius (like the one used in this design) will make your skin/program look bubblish and blobby, making what is inside the program look clumped and drawing the attention of the user to where it is not supposed to be.
Try to keep your edges less round, this will make it look more proffessional and clean. Alternatively you could make your skin be a circle window (which may look cool if you can pull it off) but mid-terms are almost always bad.
Fourth.. The background. Always try your best not to leave big areas empty if you are using a plain background. Doing this will make the elements inside look as if they were just thrown there without any kind of planning.
Fifth, font choice and font border thickness and color choice are crucial to define how much visibility your elements will have.
Although I'm somewhat of a fan of pixel fonts + 1px border I tend to use it much less often then I want. Why? Well, there are cases where it will have the opposite effect that you intended it to have. This is especially true when you are making titles... You want a title to stand out, even if it is a subtitle, and using a font that is smaller than the font of the actual content will make the user completely ignore what is written on the title/subtitle, which is something that can be very misleading. (look at the news and updates font and notice how it doesen't stand out.. you could write like.. "banana" there and no one would care, because they wouldn't read it)
And last but not least: The window borders. BE CAREFUL ABOUT THEM. Such a thin border with such round edges will totally destroy your design. Not to mention that you used a brighter color for the borders of the top and bottom, making it look as if there wasn't continuity between the different parts of the borders, and if the top and bottom parts were smaller than the middle part.
I hope you will take this as constructive criticism and use it to improve your next works. Take care :3
