Theme Lab » Theme Battles

All Orange – Free PSD Template

Leland — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:20:46 +0000

Finally, I’m releasing the losing theme from theme battle #3. In case you forgot, the winning theme was the free Tasty Showcase theme which has now been coded for WordPress.

All Orange is a simple and clean, two column blog designed by Anto. Click the image below for a bigger preview.

Keep in mind this is an uncoded PSD and not a functional WordPress theme. It’s provided as-is with no support.

Do whatever you want with it, practice your coding skills, use it on a site, whatever. As per my rules for theme battles, I won’t be coding it. Ever.

For more free PSD goodness here at Theme Lab, check out the following:

Let me know what you think in the comments! Would you like to see more PSD or HTML only themes here or would you rather just have more free WordPress themes?

Theme Battle #3 – Tasty Showcase vs. All Orange

Leland — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:56:47 +0000

Now it’s time for the third theme battle. This is the first battle with two different designers going up against each other, with Brad (Tasty Showcase) and Anto (All Orange) volunteering designs. The voting process is pretty simple, just vote for which design you’d rather see as a WordPress theme. The design with the most votes will be coded into a WordPress theme by me.

Tasty Showcase

All Orange

Read on to vote. Come on out of the RSS reader for a second since you’ll need to be on the site to vote.

The poll is scheduled to close next Monday at midnight, so you have about a week to get your votes in.

Conclusion

Tasty Showcase if coded, is sure to be a cool theme. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll pull it off yet, but I was thinking some sort of Javascript tabbing for the four posts on the homepage with an accompanying post image. Thanks to Brad of DemusDesign for designing this interesting concept.

All Orange should be a solid blog theme if it wins. It may even have a few alternative color schemes changeable through a theme options page, similar to a previous theme designed by Anto (and also a theme battle winner), Slick Red. Anto designed it in a whopping five minutes and was originally made as a free giveaway.

If you’re a designer and interesting in participating in a future theme battle, please check out this page for more information.

Remember to vote. May the best design win!

Bravissimo – Free PSD + XHTML/CSS Template

Leland — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:04:39 +0000

And now presenting the losing theme from theme battle #2, again designed by Keith. I know from the theme battles page, it states: The losing theme will be released as well, but only in uncoded PSD form. I actually started coding the Bravissimo PSD into XHTML/CSS though, so I thought I’d release that as well. The coded template has no images, so just a PSD, HTML, and CSS file will be included in the download.

Live Demo | Download

Photabulous – Free WordPress Theme

Leland — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:50:19 +0000

Here’s the winner of theme battle #2. The Photabulous theme was designed by Keith as a gallery/photoblog theme of sorts, which I then coded to WordPress. This theme has four widgetized areas, including a widgetized footer, an alternate color scheme, along with a bunch of other features which will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the rest of the features…

Thumbnails

Obviously a gallery theme like this makes use of thumbnail images. In order to cut down on the amount of thumbnails you would need to upload, I integrated the timthumb script into the theme. For single posts, you’ll need to upload one 467×350 image and place the absolute path to the image in the custom write panel.

Once that is done, timthumb will take that image and resize it for use on archive pages. If there’s no image specified, a placeholder image will be used on archive pages. No image will be displayed at all on the single post template.

Widgetized Areas

As mentioned above, this theme has four widgetized areas. Three of these are located in the footer: Footer One, Footer Two, and Footer Three. There is one widgetized area for each of the three columns. The fourth widgetized area is located on the 404 template, so you can edit what you’d like displayed on your 404 pages through the widgets panel.

Cufon Headings

The Titillium font is used for the blog title headings, page headings, as well as comment headings. Cufon, a fast text-replacement technique, is used to render this font on the theme.

Color Schemes

Included in the Photabulous WordPress theme is an alternate light color scheme. You might have caught a glimpse of it if you follow me on Twitter, where I tweeted the preview link a few times. Here’s a screenshot of it below.

Switching between the dark and light color schemes couldn’t be simpler, since I coded in a theme options page.

Simply select between either “dark” or “light” on the page to switch. It’s set to dark by default. If you’d like to change any specific colors, you can edit the dark.css or light.css files.

Conclusion

I think the theme turned out really well. Thanks again to Keith for participating in the theme battle and contributing the two designs to it. The “losing” Bravissimo PSD from theme battle #2 will be released soon.

This is the first gallery theme released here, so I’d love to know what you think of the Photabulous theme in the comments. If you have a support question, please post it in the forums.

Theme Battle #2 – Bravissimo vs. Photabulous

Leland — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:28:47 +0000

After the success of our first theme battle, regular Theme Lab commentator and designer Keith decided to volunteer a couple great PSD designs to our next one. The two screenshots are below. Simply vote for the one you’d rather see coded into a fully functional WordPress theme.

Bravissimo

Photabulous

Read on to vote. You’ll need to vote on the actual site, so leave your RSS readers for a second.

The poll is set to close next Monday at midnight, so be sure to get your vote in before then.

Conclusion

Bravissimo is designed to be a pretty normal blog theme, with space for breadcrumb navigation at the top. Except maybe the logo, it could be coded as an almost pure CSS theme, so editing things like colors would be very easy.

Photabulous, as the name would suggest, is supposed to be a photoblog theme, with room for a featured photo. I haven’t released any photo/gallery themes on Theme Lab before, so if it won, it would be the first of its kind here. The closest thing to a gallery theme here would probably be the MintSwirl theme.

You’ll notice the Photabulous screenshot has the title “PhotoPress” in it. Upon searching I found a number of other WordPress products also named PhotoPress, so I thought it would be best to change it to something else. Thanks to Ben Cook of WPblogger for suggesting the name to me on Twitter. I thought it was pretty catchy.

Thanks once again to Keith for the designs. I would like to get some different designers facing off against each other as well, so if you’re a designer, please make sure to check the theme battles page for more info on submitting your PSD designs to participate in a theme battle here.

Green Shade – Free PSD Download

Leland — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:48:24 +0000

We just presented the winner of theme battle #1, and as promised, here is the loser. Green Shade is a nice looking, two column blog design with threaded comments, designed by Anto. It was designed with WordPress in mind, although it could probably be used for a number of different CMS’s, once coded.

Download

Remember, this is an uncoded PSD and not a functional WordPress theme. Since this is a losing theme battle theme, as noted on the theme battles page, I will not be coding it. I also won’t be offering any support with it, so it’s provided as-is. You can do whatever you want with it though. Download it, practice your coding skills, use it on your sites, whatever.

Slick Red – Free WordPress Theme

Leland — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:13:56 +0000

Presenting the winner of theme battle #1, Slick Red. This theme, designed by Anto, features three widgetized areas and four different color schemes. This theme is coded for WordPress 2.7+ only and won’t work on earlier versions, and has features such as threaded comments. More info will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the other features in more detail…

Color Schemes

As mentioned above, this theme comes in four different colors: red, green, blue, and brown. Red is the default color, although you can get an idea of what the other colors look like with the logo images below.

Thanks to Andrea for suggesting these colors in this comment.

Theme Options

So how do you change the colors? Simple, use the built-in theme options panel and select the color of your choice from the dropdown menu.

As mentioned above, the default color is red, so you will have the red color scheme applied after activating the theme.

The other option is to remove the 389×63 widgetized ad area in your header. This might be useful if you don’t have anything to put there, and would rather not have an empty gray box in your header.

Widgetized Areas

Like mentioned above, this theme has three widgetized areas. The sidebar, the header ad, and the 404 page.

Conclusion

This theme has an image-based logo. To edit it you will want to download the PSD file. Then simply reupload the logo.gif file in the images/red/ directory (change to your color of choice).

I hope you all enjoyed participating in the theme battle. Thank you to the 71 voters. Before the vote started, I predicted that Slick Red would win, but didn’t expect it to win by such a wide margin.

If any designers out there want to submit a PSD to compete in a theme battle, please check the theme battles page for more information.

Also, as promised on the theme battles page, the “losing” theme will also be released in PSD format. Check for the Green Shade PSD release post soon.

Let me know what you think of the Slick Red theme in the comments. As usual, please post any support requests in the forums.

Theme Battle #1 – Slick Red vs. Green Shade

Leland — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:50:56 +0000

Theme Battles are a first here at Theme Lab. Below are screenshots of two uncoded designs, both created by Anto. It’s pretty simple, vote for the theme you’d rather see coded into a WordPress theme. Next week, I’ll tally up the votes and start coding the winning theme.

Slick Red

Green Shade

Read on to vote, and get more information on this new event at Theme Lab…

The poll is set to close next Monday at midnight, so be sure to get your vote in before then.

Conclusion

I know I haven’t been updating much lately, as I’ve been pretty busy doing freelance work as well as trying to get a couple new projects launched. I have a pretty big backlog of uncoded themes planned for release here at Theme Lab, and thought a regular “theme battle” would be an fun and interesting way to cut down on some of that work.

I’ll admit this idea is inspired by the new Theme Wars site. Unlike Theme Wars, however, the vote here actually means something. These themes are aren’t already coded, and only the winning theme will be coded and released as a WordPress theme. That, and the themes will be completely free.

Remember, check out the theme battles page for more information on this, including info on how to get your design featured in a battle here.

I’d be very interested to hear your feedback on this. How do you like this idea? What do you think of the themes up this week? Let me know which theme you voted for and why in the comments.