Today not only see’s the launch of our Christmas 4 for 1 special, but also the launch of one of our exciting themes that we collaborated with the wonderful Veerle Pieters on – Abstract.
A good few months ago we commissioned Veerle to design us a theme with a typical Veerle flair to it. We requested the theme have a business feel to it, keeping it simple and fun though. That was our only guidelines giving Veerle almost complete creative freedom on this project.
The end product that Veerle supplied us with was a pixel perfect Illustrator mashup of shapes and curvy lines in a harmonious colour palette, laid out neatly in a spacious grid structure. It was professional enough to be used as a business theme, and also fun enough to be used as a personal theme making it quite multi-functional.
Over the last month, we’ve sliced and diced her beautiful photoshop/illustrator design into neat html/css and Adii and Magnus have applied some wordpress wizardry.
I was the lucky one to be selected to create some alternate styles for the theme, not a particularly easy task when working with an industry leading designer’s designs. No pressure. I do hope you enjoy the 4 alternate styles though and will find one that suites your personality.
Without further ado here is the demo for Abstract for you to marvel at, and below you will find links to purchase it. Remember if you buy this theme in the next week you will be entitled to download 3 other WooThemes. Bargain!
About
I like this theme very much. It’s much different than other themes, a complete diferent style!
Amazing theme. Great work WooThemes and Veerle Pieters. I love the gray colour scheme. 😀
I understand the concept of premium themes, but this is one of the themes you offer that I think should definitely be free. It’s not up to par with the majority of your themes, even the free typebased theme looks better.
@Jason: Each to his own I guess. We think the design is quite outstanding and very unique. Under the bonnet, and as mentioned on the theme listing page, it houses custom widgets, different colour styles and various other theme options, which we feel totally justify it’s cost.
At a special price of 4 for 1 this week only I don’t think you can ask for much more 🙂
@Jason – Also consider that a design from such an established designer as Veerle Pieters is hard to come by (considering her busy schedule) and Abstract thus makes it easy to get such a visually rich design. I think Veerle Pieters’ name attached to this theme is worth so much more than $70 already! 🙂
@Jason – I second Adii and Mark. I don’t know how you could compare this to Typebased or any other free theme (at least the many I have seen). While Abstract does not fit my personal style, I do think the design is great and very distinctive, and the standard WooThemes functionality and support puts it into the value for money category in my book. Thats my 2 cents for what its worth 🙂
So beautiful and it has Veerle’s style to it indeed! Good stuff!
@Jason – I could not disagree with you more. Abstract is an excellent example of a great design. The graphics and colors are just stunning. Hats off Veerle & Woo, well done folks.
It looks amazing, nice work Veerle and WooThemes.
I somewhat agree with the previous comment as far as not being interested in paying for this new design.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a BEAUTIFUL design and Veerle is a great designer. But to me it just looks like a personal blog site design and not something with broad commercial appeal.
Sure you could customize it for commercial use, but then you lose the “Veerle”ness of it and then its nothing more than an overall layout. A basic one at that. The beauty of Veerle’s version isn’t just the layout but the color usage and the graphics themselves that Veerle designed.
Again, don’t get me wrong… it’s a beautiful design. But it doesn’t have the flexibility of customization that the other WooThemes have.
@Carl – I hear you and understand your comment. Although most of our themes are geared towards a niche (business, news, portfolio etc.), some of our themes just need to look cool… 🙂 I see this theme as a perfect for some of our personal bloggers (especially the ladies), as well as a great alternative option to club subscribers.
Considering that Fresh News (rather generic in layout in terms of the usage thereof) is our most popular theme by far (!!), I also don’t think that every single theme we release needs to scratch an itch. If you understand what I mean… 🙂
This is a really beautiful theme I was really looking forward to, but for me I really need a CMS/Blog situation for my whole site. Are you thinking of putting a more “personal website” style theme together? One similar to over easy or Vibrant CMS that has some more personal touches like a lifestreaming widget etc for individuals?
@Felicia – We have two new business / CMS type themes coming, which should be available in January. Preview them…
Cushy —> http://bit.ly/plH3
The Station —> http://bit.ly/wR0o
really cool artistic theme, but I noticed that the PSD doesnt come with all the color options and it’s a lot harder to try to customize that some of the other themes.
Is there any plan on creating a more ecommerce theme in the near future?
I need to have a look on my computer when I get to work but so far I real like this design and if it fits a project I’ll pitch it. I would like to see mobile themes come out to come along with the new themes. That would be killer!!
Not really loving this theme. For a premium theme it lacks a LOT and looks no different than any number of free themes you could find at wordpress.org’s theme directory. Nothing particular good-looking about it and it’s not versatile for other non-blog uses.
Where are the great themes like Fresh News?
I have to agree with Jason above. I don’t know who Veerle Pieters, but I can’t imagine this being her best work. Should be a free one.
And I agree with Rand above in regard to the Fresh News theme. That theme is what endeared me to you guys to begin with – it’s VERY professional, very clean and can be used in 100 different ways (as is proven by the showcase). Over Easy and Vibrant CMS are other great offerings.
@Rand – You always have Busy Bee 😉
@Taylor – It’s hard to please everybody, but the we are trying to please another type of crowd with this one. Judging by the amount of club members who have downloaded it along with initial sales, this is a very popular theme indeed. But thanks for backing up Fresh News 😉
Magnus, thanks for the update! Glad to see it is getting downloaded/sold – can’t argue with that.
@Taylor & @Rand – As Magnus mentioned, this theme has definitely proved popular with our club members, as well as new users getting in on the 4for1 action. I think it is important to note that our themes are all aimed at different users; and somebody that would buy Abstract, would not necessarily have a use for Fresh News (and vice versa).
So all our themes should be judged objectively on their design and functionality; not on whether an individual has a use therefor. They should also be judged in a way which considers our club members, who gets access to all our themes – if we were to produce 3 Fresh News replica’s a month, the value for our club members would decrease significantly.
After commenting a few times in this discussion about the viability of this theme, I decided to write a more in-depth post that looks at the popularity of our individual themes. The outcome of that analysis is The WooThemes Long Tail —> http://bit.ly/4wOeys
Being familiar with Veerle Pieters’ work for a long while, it has been some time since I’ve dropped in on her website. Perhaps she should consider using Abstract for her own site (which looks out of date, and messy to me). Presumably she could use Abstract for free, but would she be allowed to drop the link to Woo ? 😉
Hi Adii – my personal issue is with the overall quality. I totally get that you can’t do ALL business themes or ONLY stuff like Fresh News, but after reading your long tail analysis I’m even more convinced your most popular themes are such because they’re exceptionally high quality and incredibly versatile.
“Fresh News is by far our most popular theme, followed by VibrantCMS, Gazette Edition and Over Easy.”
I would add Papercut and Flash News to that list as well, and by the graph they appear to be doing moderately well.
Some of your more recent themes, including Thick, Blog Theme and now Abstract just don’t measure up and really resemble any number of free themes you can get anywhere else (this is also reflected in your consumption graph). It’s because of this I haven’t renewed my themes club membership – instead I’m waiting for some more work equal to the stuff mentioned above. Regardless of a theme’s end use – it’s the apparent quality that I really appreciated about Woo themes. You guys have a great thing going on here, and I am a HUGE fan. But it’s like a popular band – they have to continue putting out great songs and albums to stay popular and relevant.
Thanks for listening!
@Taylor – I hear you, I hear you. But obviously not all of the Beatles’ songs went to #1 and so all of our themes won’t be hits either… 🙂
Also consider that you might not think THiCK is a superior quality theme, but one of our THiCK users might not think Fresh News is that great – so our approach is to try cover *most* of our bases *most* of the time (which we seem to be doing).
That being said, I expect that you’ll be back as a subscriber in January, when you see the string of top notch themes that are in the pipeline… 🙂
🙂 Fair enough Adii
I can’t wait to see what you guys have coming down the pipe!
@Taylor – And just to reiterate if it wasn’t obvious from my comments: We LOVE to be engaged and challenged by our users in a constructive and objective way, because that way we can improve our themes, support, service etc. So your comments are very valuable in these neck of the woods! 🙂
And for anyone else interested – you can read Veerle’s own run-down of the project and the design process here: http://bit.ly/hLqj
I like the overall design of the Abstract theme. It’s got that awesome flair from Veerle and a bit of whimsical feel to it. It’s good stuff.
One thing that I’d like to point out is that every variation of the theme other than the default has an issue with the tiling background. Although I can’t tell on the Creme version, the others you can definitely tell that the background doesn’t tile properly. Just thought I might mention it, since it should be an easy fix.
@Bryan – Thanks for spotting that. We’ll be releasing a bug-fixed version ASAP! 🙂
nicetheme. Great work WooThemes ….. I love it…
Woo, you’ve done it again. Another great Woo theme added to bestwpthemes.com, where we list the best WordPress themes around the web. Congrats!
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