The Best of ThemeForest – May 2011 Edition

Welcome to May’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. With over 3,800 site templates and themes available from 1,086 authors, we’ll pick out the best from this month, point out our top authors and keep you up to date on the latest marketplace news.

Featured Author

This month’s featured author is Koev. Dimitar Koev has a healthy portfolio of 4 items that have contributed to an amazing 1,167 sales at the time of writing, earning him a silver paw. His work on the premium OpenCart theme ModernStore has ranked him up nearly 500 purchases and a full five star rating.

If you’re looking for a great OpenCart theme, this might be the guy!

Featured New Author

addway has only one file available, a $35(+2) portfolio WordPress theme. Yet he’s still managed to garner 425 sales in less than a month, an impressive achievement for any author. addway’s portfolio isn’t that informative so we have little background information, excpet that he joined only in February of this year!

Free File of May

Slideo 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!).

Slideo is an impressive business theme with sliding menu and readymade page templates. Plus, the theme works in seven different colours so you ncan choose a style your like.

The Best of ThemeForest…

As with each month, there’s been some great themes in May! I’ve picked out my personal favourite files that were published in April alone but be sure to share yours in the comments.

Kozuka

Kozuka is a corporate landing page with a “sleek CSS3 touch”. The typography of Kozuka stands out as a mix between some serif fonts and some replaced ones. The developer also points out the commented code which makes it either to make further edits and to customize the theme to give it your own style.

Brisk

Brisk is another business-oriented portfolio theme for WordPress with a nice, modern style. The larger image at the top is in fact a slider, with six of them being included in the package alongside 150+ custom fonts and 15+ page templates.

Core

Core is a minimalist theme aimed at photographers or those with an extensive gallery of images waiting to be shown off. The theme itself features three homepage styles, a built-in font manager for choosing your own custom font faces and a custom image/galleries uploader for better managament of your site. In four days, it’s already grabbed 71 sales.

NANICA

NANICA is yet another portfolio theme (the ThemeForest authors seem to love these!), this time optimized to a single page that’s completely jQuery powered. It features an elegant scrolling mechanism that slides between the different sections, each beautifully designed content areas in a simple, clean and elegant design. Plus, it’s only $19(+2)!

CleanSlate

I don’t normally feature admin templates but CleanSlate is one of my recent favourites. The HTML5 and CSS3 compliant admin theme features a clean, simple dashboard style with built in progress bars, form validation, widgets, tabs and accordions. I particularly love the jQuery-powered animation built into this theme!

Archin

Have you got any idea what Archin is? Really, no? Well it’s another portfolio theme created for WordPress! The description of this theme highlights the customizability options that it offers including unlimited sidebars in a custom admin panel, an easy form creator and a visual composer for customizations.

Plus over 3,870 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.

The Month at ThemeForest

The Marketplaces Get a Makeover

ThemeForest and all the other marketplaces have grabbed themselves a makeover with some visual design tweaks ensured to please many. The top half (or above the fold, for older designers) has seen the most changes with a redesigned navigation bar linking to the main categories, and some rearranged item titles and breadcrumbs. I don’t work for Envato so I reckon I can make an unbias statement in declaring that i’m loving it! Great work guys.

ThemeForest Hits 1,000 WordPress Themes

If you’ve ever bought a WordPress theme from ThemeForest, there’s at least another 999 for you to try. This is because ThemeForest hit it’s 1,000 milestone of themes compatible with the popular WordPress platform. It took 2.5 years to get to this point but i’m sure some authors have enjoyed the ride, especially the one who sold $160,000 in just seven months!

To celebrate, the WP1000 site is giving away two sets of icons from SoftFacade and Turbomilk, and asking you to vote on which one is better. Best thing is, you can even use them in CodeCanyon or ThemeForest items!

ThemeForest Continues into WPCandy’s Semi Finals

WPCandy is running a Theme Madness contest in which various theme retailers and marketplaces are pitted against each other. ThemeForest has made it into the semi-finals and is currently against Elegant Themes. Be sure to vote for the paw!