The Best of ThemeForest: June 2011

Welcome to June’s “The Best of ThemeForest” roundup where we take a look at the stuff coming out of one of the world’s most popular premium theme marketplaces. From a marketplace network with 816,570 members and about 4,000 files on ThemeForest alone, I’ll be sorting through this month’s stuff to find my favorite files, check out the featured authors and show off some new developments at one of the world’s most popular premium theme marketplaces.

Featured Author

This month’s featured author is templateup, an author based in New Zealand with thirteen Themeforest items that have helped him rank up 1823 sales and a gold paw. templateup’s main portfolio at ThemeForest consists of a selection of WordPress themes, mainly focused on business and e-commerce – popular trends at ThemeForest. His profile badges also show he’s bought at least fifty items himself and referred some too, so his success might well help pay for yours too!

Featured New Author

IcarusIndustries has only one file available, a $35(+2) WordPress theme. However, in his month on the site, he’s reached 148 sales with a black paw. IcarusIndustries is actually an alias for a guy called Alex, based over here in the good old UK. The Brighton-based designer created Callisto, a well-designed creative theme with a nice large slider and beautiful textured background.

Free File for June

Metrosite is this month’s free file of the month, the one file on ThemeForest you can download without charge for one month only (and as the end of the month is arriving soon, you better be quick!).

Metrosite is an elegant, clean site template, aimed at being used for online products and services. The site template includes a PSD version, and a working contact form as well as documentation regarded as well done by our review team.

Metrosite is the work of Indonez, an Envato Elite author based in Indonesia. The team themselves have sold over $250,000 (up to $1,000,000 in fact, but we can’t be sure since the authors, nor the ThemeForest team release exact data) with 34 themes on ThemeForest. Yes, you should be jealous of their 10,380+ sales!

The Best of ThemeForest…

Every month there are some great themes added to ThemeForest, after passing a stringent review by our review team. Here’s some of my personal favourite, and some of the most popular, added in the last month.

Express Store

Express Store is a premium e-commerce WordPress theme that’s easy to install and flexible enough to customize. The theme is a working example of e-commerce with WordPress, but does not require any type of plugin. All the regular features are there, including some like international tax support, stock inventory manager and coupons. It looks very promising and, even though I don’t run an online store, I’d love to buy this just to try it out!

Romix

Romix is a clean corporate WordPress theme with a large slider at the top for advertising, well, what you have to advertise. By default, the theme is a mix of white and light greys, although similar pastel colors can be applied to get Romix an alternative feel. A pleasing addition is all the shortcodes included, especially a 3, 4 or 5 column pricing table.

Avenue

Avenue is a bold magazine/blog theme for WordPress that can be suitable for most projects. I’m a big fan of bold, “Impact”-style fonts and this theme uses them to create a great effect. Avenue comes with a custom theme options panel, including the ability to swap out to one of the predefined skins or to create your own skin with custom colours. Although I can’t talk about this due to me not owning this theme, the page for it advertises an inbuilt review system, which seems interesting.

Vivid

Vivid is a beautiful email newsletter with three colour schemes for it’s cloud-based design. Vivid is highly flexible and even allows you to swap the layout around to create a preferential campaign. The design is ready for use with MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, if you wish to use it in that way. Layered design files are also included, in PNG and Photoshop formats, for your editing needs.

White Label

Admin templates are rarer in these roundups, but White Label is a great example of one. The dashboard-style interface is a beautiful standard for what admin templates should look and feel like. Surprisingly, but also pleasingly, White Label works fine on both an iPad and an iPhone, which is great for those wanting to manage their site on the go. There’s all sorts of hidden surprises, like the various widgets and the fantastic lightbox gallery.

Clear Theme

Clear Theme has had a pretty epic twenty days, in which it managed to hit over 300 individual sales of the multipurpose WordPress template. As with most themes on ThemeForest, the template is laden with tons of features like some cool jQuery effects, dynamic image resizing for thumbnails… basically the stuff that you don’t care about, but will find useful when the scenario that they fix becomes apparent.

Plus over 3,970 more…

Like every month, we always recommend checking out the wider selection of themes on ThemeForest. Marrying a great review team with stringent quality guidelines, pretty much every file on ThemeForest is kick-ass and you should be sure to check out the wide selection available.

The Month at ThemeForest

Understanding the Reviewing Process

Siddharth published an interesting flow chart on the Envato notes blog, detailing how the review team at ThemeForest review new items submitted to their queue.

The graphic describes the process for a WordPress template but it’s essentially applicable for each and every submission. Pay attention to the little notes on the side since they contain additional details about each section.

AppStorm Launches Mac Freelance App Bundle

Here at the Envato network, there’s been some great bundle offers in the past. But these have generally contained themes or video, or some sort of other marketplace asset. However, the AppStorm team have teamed up with app developers to bring over $330 worth of apps for just $49. At AppStorm, it’s all about apps and I spend countless hours reviewing and writing about them over there. Therefore, you should be sure to check out all the reviews my fellow writers have contributed for the eight apps included in the bundle from big name developers who have contributed apps like 1Password and Billings to the bundle.

Whilst not technically ThemeForest news, i’m sure all the Mac-equipped authors might appreciate some of the content bundled into the low $49 price. Plus, if your an author, you can grab it using your marketplace credit at CodeCanyon.