The Best of ThemeForest – February 2011 Edition

Today we’ll be continuing our “The Best Of” series for our sister site, ThemeForest. Every month, we review the past thirty-ish days of our premium themes marketplace from our favorite new author to a file you can grab for free! Searching for inspiration? Looking for something to buy? Be sure to check out the roundup below!

The Month at ThemeForest

It’s hard to believe it’s just been a month and a half since the new year… here’s the latest news on what’s happening at ThemeForest.

First author hits 20,000 sales

Kreisi, ThemeForest’s top selling author, hit a milestone this month when he became the first author to hit 20,000 sales on the Envato Marketplaces. His portfolio rocks 29 ThemeForest themes with nearly 21,000 sales at the time of this writing. He’s one of only four authors who’s passed the $250,000 sales threshold (and naturally, our editor is one of them!). Brandon (epicera) is right behind him with nearly 16,000 sales, but there’s lots of great competition coming up from the author ranks!

The Austrian based web designer has over 3,000 sales since his August 2008 membership. Tuts+ interviewed Kriesi, real-name Christian, back in December so be sure to check that out!

WooThemes Joins the ThemeForest Bandwagon

WooThemes launched a selection of their own premium Drupal and EE themes on the Marketplaces recently. Unfortunately, WordPress alternatives are not available yet, but surely that is only a matter of time.

Envato Launches WP-Select

ThemeForest launched WP-Select this month, a hand-picked selection of premium ThemeForest themes from Envato staff. The site features some new search filters such as colour schemes, layout and price to be able to pick the best theme to suit your needs and budget. Read the full announcement at EnvatoNotes!

The Best of ThemeForest…

As per always, February has been a busy month at ThemeForest with lots of great new themes being released across the board from new and legacy editors alike.

Synoptic

Synoptic is a beautiful PSD and HTML template available at the tiny price of $15. Synoptic is obviously oriented around business and portfolio pieces and includes some great CSS3 animations. The theme already has a straight 5-star rating and 112 sales.

Utopian

Utopian is a very image-heavy HTML site template by our February featured new author.

SideWinder

SideWinder is one of the more unique themes aimed at portfolio users. It’s based around the grid layout and is an image-centric, fully skinnable theme.

Oh and did I mention it’s made by the editor of this very site ;)

Multimedia

Multimedia is a colour-heavy, image-intensive WordPress theme aimed at multimedia producers and bloggers as it’s name suggests. The theme went live on Valentine’s Day and just three days later achieved $1500 in sales.

Child Care Creative

Child Care Creative is a unique theme in that it has some great typography choices. The scheme of fonts used match the target audience impeccably. For it’s high-for-themeforest-but-still-very-low $40 price tag, you get bonus shopping cart and newsletter features.

Ermark

Ermark is a very unique, urban-style site template which comes with included PSDs. The blog theme, not currently available for WordPress, is made by a graphic design (something which is pretty event). The great integration and usage of serif and Cufon typography makes this look stunning and one of the best themes i’ve seen on ThemeForest this month! It even comes with an even better looking mobile theme!

Plus over 70,000 more…

As always, ThemeForest hosts thousands of great themes. Marrying a great review team with stringent quality guidelines, pretty much every file on ThemeForest is great and you should be sure to check out the wide selection available.

Free File of February

Xero by wizylabs is this month’s free file of the month, the one file on ThemeForest you can download without charge for one month only.

Xero is an HTML/CSS site template aimed at portfolios and professional blogs. There’s three robust portfolio options and a full working PHP contract form included. There’s also a very nice jQuery dropdown menu included and used in the theme. Plus, you get eight different colour options to brand it any way you want. Grab it before the end of February to grab it for free!

Featured Author

This month’s featured author is tonyc. Their portfolio consists of 14 ThemeForest files with, alongside a CodeCanyon file, have amassed over 1,370 sales across WordPress and others.

Featured New Author

3circlestudio is a new author to ThemeForest who launched his first item in January. In the month or so since then, Utopia has already reached over $760 in sales and a full five star average rating.

3circlestudio also has one CodeCanyon file, the navigation bar from his Utopia template. Expect more from him soon.