The more WordPress themes that are created, the more difficult it can be to find high quality, well designed (inside and out) themes. Recently plaintxt.org ran a design competition challenging theme designers to create skins for their Sandbox theme. All the submissions are in, and the winners have yet to be announced. I took a look through all the designs in the handy live previewer and while I was rather disappointed in the quality of many of the themes, there are some wonderful designs that are worth mentioning. Here are the skins that I think stand out from the crowd of 46 submitted, along with my humble suggestions as to what might have been improved:
Essay, by Ian Stewart:
A minimalist approach that makes great use of white space and typography. I’m not really sure why the designer included so much margin on the left though…
Milkia, by Christian Betancourt:
An utterly clean design with focus on content alone. It could use a smidge more color though.
Mix, by Jauhari Nurudin:
Though I’m not fond of the seafoam green, the designer makes excellent use of icons and colors in the sidebar to differentiate between sections.
Prima, by Sunaryo Hadi:
This design is very pretty, and makes a nice use of borders on the posts to pop them off the page a little. Better colors could have been chosen to go with the brown though, and I think a serif font would have worked better for the blog title.
Sakena, by Shazia Mistry:
A lovely design with a very “un-bloggy” look about it. Neat use of Flickr images to create a header. I would have included more margin between the content and the sidebar.
Sandpress, by Arpit Jacob:
Beautiful and sleek- I love the reflections on the date icons and the navigation is very nice. The black box containing the RSS options certainly pops out at you, but it’s rather jarring, and would have been nicer using the blue as background.
Shades of Gray, by Leslie Franke:
This design is very sharp and clean. The post column is a bit wide though- it’s better practice to keep your content columns to 15 or so words per line for readability.
Certainly design is subjective, but I think the clear winner is Sandpress. What do you think? Want to know what the judges thought? The winners are to be announced on August 6, 2007, by 12:00 AM.
So, what about my own big announcement that I mentioned in Thursday’s post…? It’s contest time! I have a great contest planned for the next couple of weeks. Want details? Next post….
Thanks to everyone who has been participating in the very interesting discussion in the prior post. I appreciate all the thoughtful comments.
![[Post to Twitter]](http://randaclay.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Delicious]](http://randaclay.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-delicious.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Digg]](http://randaclay.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-digg.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://randaclay.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su.png){kind=icon}
Wow, Randa, thanks!. I think big margins are elegant and increase readability — so there you go.
And it seems we share a “best of” pick, Shades of Gray (a possible winner IMHO). Some of my other favorites:
Blueberry
Hourglass
Moo Point
Promised Land
Takimata
By the way, I LOVE your Bluebird theme. Great job on that.
Thanks for stopping by Ian and for your kind comments! I thought Takimata was interesting- it made me think about breaking out of the “standard” blog grid.
Essay, Sakena, Takimata and Shades of Gray are my favorites. However, I think Diurnal may fair well with the colors changing to match the time of day.
All of the designs really showcase the power of Sandbox.
I like the Sakena the best. Bold colors and easy on the eye.
Yeah, that is really cool. There is a lot to like about that design, but the sidebar is a little too “boxy” for my taste. I thought it would have been better with all those borders taken off.
thanks for the shout-out Randa!! Feedback is always appreciated! I’ll be tweaking before I officially release it, so your suggestions are likely to make it in there.
I agree with that Randa. I would have liked to see Diurnal with out all the boxed out sections.
I was wondering when the competition was finishing – there a real mixed bag there. I’d have to agree and say Sandpress looks like one of the better ones. I look forward to hearing about your competition – give us a clue then?
Sakena, by Shazia Mistry is my favorite concept, but it has quite a few issues because of its fixed width
Moo-Point is nice to because of it’s slightly less bloggy layout.
Oranges is kinda neat but the sidebars need quite a bit of styling work. I do like the concept and the colors, though.
Shades of Gray is nice, too. Reminds me a lot of Cutline. It feels like many of the submissions are works in progress, which is probably why this one will win. It definitely seems the most refined.
I’m rather surprised there weren’t more submissions. I guess there’s a lot of work that goes into creating a theme!
thanks LaurenMarie
and the issues – I know, I am looking into the fixes before a formal release. I set aside 1 day to do it – so even though it was not fully complete, I had to submit it anyways.
Good call Randa – SandPress did win and it was a well-deserved win!
I’m sure you’ll get lots of download Shaz- it’s a very nice theme. It was fun to try and judge the contest on my own and then see what the judges picked.
I like the Sakena blog design. There are some things that need to be tweaked, but I am a sucker for anything that makes great use of flicker.
This is a hugely useful post for someone who is starting to look at Wordpress, and that’s me right now, so glad I found it.
Thanks Randa!
How easy is it to customise any of these templates? Bearing in mind I am a complete wordpress n00bie but I have been using blogger for a while and have had to do some html work on my own template from time to time..
I love the green of Mix – I always find green on a blog to be so fresh.
I’m reading you via the RSS feed of the No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community by the way, in case I haven’t commented here before and let you know that already.. I have certainly been here but not sure I said anything..
Cheers!
Snoskred
Thanks for your comment Snoskred! I would assume these “skins” for Sandbox are as easy to customize as any, though I haven’t worked with Sandbox much.
I love the “Mix – by Jauhari” lot, for its nice and clean design. Thanks for sharing this design with us.
fun to try and judge the contest on my own and then see what the judges picked.
I really like the Prima design are these available as templates? If so where can I find them?