Could you tell us a little about yourself
Thanks for asking. I am Sunny Nathan, a 32 year old husband, professional engineer and a part time web developer. I started learning HTML and CSS out of a desperate need to create database driven sites for a not for profit foundation I co-found with a school mate from Canada.

Where do you find your creative inspiration?
I am perpetually on the learning curve, since this is not my primary occupation I have not had an opportunity to obtain any formal academic training. With that said, I draw inspiration from many sources, magazines, television, the Internet, pretty much anything I encounter. I have lately taken to Blueprint CSS and I might use it in all future contractual work, maybe eventually use it to design free themes.

What tools do you use?
As of now, I am using Photoshop and notepad, I hand code the CSS and XHTML, so I seldom use any editors.

How much time do you spend on each theme?
Anywhere between 3 to 8 hours to design and validate, again some themes never see the light of day, so it totally depends on my mood.

Why do you do design themes for WordPress?
Mostly because people have come to expect of HeadsetOptions and MandarinMusing. We started off making themes to develop relationship with our user base and we feel it is a good way to give back to the wonderful WordPress community.

What is your favorite snack while hacking away at your themes?
I barely snack, but I do drink tons of coffee. I sometime work with the TV on, just to catch the news or a rerun of Seinfeld while coding.

Not including your own themes; What is some of your favorites?
I like most of the themes by Design Disease. Theron Parlin and Derek Punsalan make pretty nifty themes; Brian Gardner, Darren Hoyt (who I found out recently is geographically the closest well-known designer to me), Small Potato are some designers who are consistently good, I like hoards of other themes, too many to mention, but pretty much anything that gets of wpSnap is in my opinion pretty high up on my list.

What are some of your favorite hang outs on the web?
Frankly I do not get online as much as I would like to, I usually hit my Google Reader to catch on feeds, visit Seth Godin at least once a day ever since I moved from being a researcher to a marketer at my day job, and the rest are usually for emails and site updates. I visit your site every time I see you on my MyBlogLog friends list; I seldom log into MyBlogLog myself though.

When not at your desk, what do you do for fun?
My wife and I catch up on our respective experiences each day, we usually end up discussing politics, books or just about anything our mind wanders into. We watch a lot of classic thrillers; we both are Hitchcock fans and have only a handful of movies to go before we have seen em all!

Do you design for any other CMS?
TextPattern and Joomla, however WordPress is my favorite.

Where do you see WordPress heading in the future?
Undoubtedly towards becoming the most popular and the best free CMS in the world. It’s only a matter of time.

Be sure to check out some of Sunny’s themes.

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I got a chance to interview ChiQ Montes. It really is fun to make new friends within the WordPress themers community. What follows is some fun insight into ChiQ Montes.

ChiQ Montes, Please tell us a little about yourself.

I am ChiQ Montes. Female. Filipino. I have been building websites and blogs for 5 years already and have been designing WordPress Themes for more than a year now. I am a techie at heart and a very laid-back person as well.

Where do you find your creative inspiration?

I visit a lot of blogs everyday just so I’d get to see what kind of lay-out would best work for them and even cluttered ones would serve as an inspiration since I would then try to create a theme to help them improve their blogs. Also, I compliment this with visiting CSS Galleries  for the creative part of the theme like colors and image/icon placement.

What tools do you use?

I use Photoshop for designing themes then the good ol’ trusty notepad for coding and editing.

How much time do you spend on each theme?

I do try to discipline myself by imposing a time limit in creating WordPress Themes so as to be productive as possible but then most of the time, it all boils down to how I creative I feel when working on a theme. Sometimes, it only takes an hour to execute my ideas but there are also themes that I end up doing for three days.

Why do you design themes for WordPress?

Ever since I learned about WordPress and have used them for my blogs, I simply fell in love with it. It made everything easier. But being a web designer myself, using other people’s theme was not enough for me. I have also seen a big demand in WordPress Themes therefore I decided to plunge in the market.

What is your favorite snack while hacking away at your themes?

Eating while working isn’t a good practice at all therefore I try not to do it if possible. But at times that I feel like breaking the rules, I usually go for Nacho chips!

Not including your own themes; What are some of your favorites?

I do like using illacrimo by designdisease

What are some of your favorite hang outs on the web?

I never fail to visit smashingmagazine, blogcatalog and entrecard.

When not hiding in your workplace, what else do you do for fun?

I watch movies a lot! I also read business books/magazines and even play computer games.

Do you design for any other CMS?

Currently, no.

Where do you see WordPress heading in the future?

Oh! I believe WordPress will soon dominate even the e-commerce platform. In fact, there are already Premium Themes and plugins available today for this specific purpose and I’d eventually want to  WordPress themes for e-commerce sites.

ChiQ Montes Links

You can cacth her WordPress themes on her website WordPress Theme Designer, or you can follow her on Twitter, BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. I think we can all learn a great deal from this budding designer.

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Headset Options

Sunny has a bunch of high quality themes. He also has one of the best tutorials I’ve found on DOMTab.

One of his newest themes is Silk(image to the left).

Keep up the good work Sunny!

Justin Tadlock

This guy really doesn’t need a link from me, But I like his themes because he has challenged other themers like myself to take it to the next level. He did with a free theme what the premium themers should have done.

WpThemeDesigner

AKA ChiQ Montes, has great potential. I just recently found her via MyBlogLog. I friend told me they believed ChiQ Montes & SmallPotato are one in the same. I don’t think it’s true… but then again who knows. ChiQ Montes I look forward to your future designs.

BlogOhBlog

Jai has moved on in and is feeling right at home. He has added some great free themes including 4 very well designed premium themes. Jai also drops alot of tidbits like this jem on rounded corners with css.

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Our Featured designer today is Moses Francis of wpthemesplugin.com. You may know some of his themes already. In fact I used his theme fourWPTP when I first started this site! You can find a listing of all his themes on his WordPress Theme page. Over the last few months I have learn a great deal looking under the hood of his themes.
The Interview with Moses Francis:

Could you tell us a little about yourself?
Well I’m a 20-something Malaysian that has been involved in making money online since 2004, I was more of a Mambo cms fan in my earlier stage but I switched to WordPress and have never looked back since.

Tell us what it was like to do your first WordPress theme?
It was exciting and scary, I pretty much suck at coding and most of my newer themes have been coded my a friend (outsourced), I had been designing logo’s and banners and stuff but WP Themes were something else.

Do you primarily develop your own designs or port others to WordPress?
Unique, that what I’ve tried from the start and so far I’ve not ported any template out there to WordPress.

What software do you use to develop your WordPress themes?
Adobe Photoshop CS

How much time do you take with each theme?
It depends, my first theme took me 2 weeks, haha and it got better with the second theme (completed in 1 week), nowadays I outsourced most of the design work too.

What is your favorite WordPress theme you designed, and why?
My fav so far is my current theme at wpthemesplugin.com (WPTP-Chocolate), because for me it looks like a complete, clean and simple theme, I haven’t released it to the public yet but in due time i shall do it.

With all the WordPress themes on the net today What Theme is your favorite?
Well, that’s hard to say but I have utmost respect for themes designed by WPdesigner, Brian Gardner and Design Disease.

What advice would you give a new WordPress theme designer?
Don’t give up easily, the net is now flooded with “How-To’s” to get you started with designing a theme from scratch and finishing up with
the coding work.

How long will you continue developing themes?
Well, i love WordPress, so most probably as long as I live or as long as the domain wpthemesplugin.com belongs to me.

As long as the domain belongs to you?
Yes, I have received some private offers to purchase the site lock stock and barrel.

If you were not developing WordPress themes, what would you spend your time on?
My football (soccer) skills or traveling.

You can learn more about Moses Francis from his website wpthemesplugin.com

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That said, I know you guys are enjoying this new feature. So I would like your input. Who would you like to learn more about? What are some of the questions, or topics that I miss?

I would also like to add another weekly feature. On what, I have no ideas yet. I had thought of a weekly highlighting of the best themes for the week, but this seems to be done to death by other bloggers. So again your suggestions would be extremely helpful.

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Each of his themes this month is inspired by a simple but elegant photo. As an example, his first design for the month was inspired by this photo of a dragee:

The resulting theme, simple and unique soft blue color pallet steps outside the box.

Here’s a peak at some of his other themes:

Interview:

Mr.BlogIt: Could you tell us a little about yourself?
jez: My name is C. Julian ‘jez’ Klewes, I am a 21 years old student from Germany. I live nearby Duesseldorf, which is located 40 miles from the Netherlands. I study a management and business studies oriented subject at an university in the Netherlands. It is called International Business and Management Studies and lasts four years.

Recently I finished semester two and already received my pre-degree. Before going to university I did my a-levels at a secondary school in Germany.While at school I devoted myself to playing basketball several times a week, my girlfriend, hooking up with friends and of course programming and designing things.
I did different kinds of work on the web: some freelance design, some programming, but also consulting (maybe giving training courses is a better explanation) and researching. Most of the work-samples available on my portfolio are related to this span of time. School in Germany equals lots of free time you know…
Before finishing my a-levels I started DJing at home, then later on at a local club, which after half a year terminated the “club series”. I am a passionate vinyl-collector and occasionally I release short one hour mixes on my website. While most of the transitions are okay, it turns out that every mix includes at least one hard screw-up; but that’s where the amateur ends and the professional dj starts I guess.
About colours – I like the light colours, especially white, gray, shades of white and black, but also the contrast of neon green, and the warm colour red. It is always a challenge designing themes, that are not “for oneself”, because you have to loose your own colour-bias.
I don’t primarily design in order to make a living, but I am student who does all kinds of ‘usual’ side-jobs. Whenever I get a request to design something I am happy to help out for a few bucks.
My favourite food, not as if anyone cared, is a mixture of Italian food and American fast food. Basically everything that is considered unhealthy and tastes delicious. It is always a pity when my brother, a trained gourmet chief, is around because I don’t like to eat half what he cooks.

Mr.BlogIt: Tell us what it was like to do your first WordPress theme?
jez: My first released theme? Whew, that was a lot of work actually, because you have to make sure they are at least to some extent valid in CSS and html/xhtml.
Else the theme will look screwed up on others websites. I developed my first personal WordPress theme around 2003 I believe, when I started my site www.h4x3d.com as a personal blog.
Back then I had to read lots of literature, many articles on the internet, to understand the anatomy of themes. Especially the_loop annoyed me, because I did not figure out how it worked.

Mr.BlogIt: Do you primarily develop your own designs or port others to WordPress?
jez: I strictly develop my own designs, though porting client websites from static html to WordPress is fun, too.

Mr.BlogIt: What software do you use to develop your WordPress themes?
jez: I do my coding work in notepad, because I do not know any other editors and their benefits. For the graphics I use gimp and Photoshop. I cannot effort anything else currently.

Mr.BlogIt: How much time do you take with each theme?
jez: Usually I am sloppy when I have no pressure and it takes weeks, sometimes months to finalize an idea, but with the current theme a day challenge… well I have one day minus time that I spent with my girlfriend, doing work around the house and for my clients. It is really a challenge to see how efficient you can be on a single day. This is only possible at the moment, as I have finished university for the summer.

Mr.BlogIt: What is your favorite WordPress theme you designed, and why?
jez: I believe it bonsai growth, because it is so bold and loud. It jumps the visitor on first sight and it is so easily to modify. This is also one of the themes where most of the plagiarism occurs. There are plenty of porn websites that use this template. Wonder why…

Mr.BlogIt: With all the WordPress themes on the net today What Theme is your favorite?
jez: I really like the themes by bartelme and the ports by ilemoned. Milo has some great themes, too, but I see her themes more like concepts of unfinished themes. The themes by Small Potato are in so far great, as they all validate and are coded very clean. My code is sloppy and a mess to read; I believe I should read more code of other designers to learn how to “code clean”.

Mr.BlogIt: What advice would you give a new WordPress theme designer?
jez: Do things right or don’t do them at all, because there are so many themes flooding the themeviewer that are of low quality and infected by sponsored and totally unrelated links. Also do not sell out, be your own boss and do not sell your templates to third parties.

Mr.BlogIt: How long will you continue developing themes?
jez: As long as I have free time. As soon as next year (winter) I will be doing an internship abroad and I doubt I will have that much time then…

Mr.BlogIt: If you were not developing WordPress themes, what would you spend your time on?
jez: Reading stuff on the internet, listening to vinyls from my collection, of course spending more time with my girlfriend and friends, but also doing more sports. Since I am not playing in a basketball club anymore, I have been reducing my visits to the court to weekends…

Jez has a great deal to offer to the WordPress community. You can learn more about him and his works at his website: http://www.h4x3d.com/

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It’s not that other designers don’t do the same with their themes. But Small Potato takes it to another level by aiding designers with his tutorials. His group of articles takes you step by step through the design of a WordPress theme. If you haven’t read these articles you owe it to yourself to take a look.

Small Potato uploaded his first theme ( Neo-Sapien ) to WordPress viewer on June 19th 2006. That theme has had almost 10,000 downloads to date.

Here is a quick review of just a few of his themes:

Our Interview:

Mr.BlogIt: Could you tell us a little about yourself?

Small Potato: I love fried chicken, fried shrimp, and fried fish. And… people call me Small Potato or just SP.

Mr.BlogIt: Tell us what it was like to do your first WordPress theme?
Small Potato:I wouldn’t say easy, but it wasn’t hard. I remember taking apart the Orange Sky theme to experiment and going through the WordPress codex to learn template structures and WordPress functions. I started looking into WordPress themes because I was already using WordPress for blogging, but I couldn’t find a theme that would let me better integrate my website ads, especially Adsense. So, I had to design my own theme that would yield a better click through rate percentage; I was averaging 5% CTR and wanted to aim for 8 to 10%. After redesigning my blog, CTR jumped to 8 to 8.5 percent.

Mr.BlogIt: Do you primarily develop your own designs or port others to WordPress?
Small Potato:So far, everything under my name is original. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing to port designs. It’s just that I’ve been more interested in doing my own thing. If there’s a really beautiful design out there that’s not available to WordPress users, then sure, I’ll port it.

Mr.BlogIt: What software do you use to develop your WordPress themes?
Small Potato:I use Photoshop for design and Notepad for coding. Also, I have several local installs of WordPress on my computer. I’m running versions: 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2.

Mr.BlogIt: How much time do you take with each theme?
Small Potato:Typically, it takes me around one day from start to finish; I don’t keep track by hours. If it’s a complicated design with a lot of details then I might take three days. However, it really depends on how much I procrastinate.

Mr.BlogIt: What is your favorite WordPress theme you designed, and why?
Small Potato:Braintied is my favorite. It’s minimalistic… very minimalistic. I was lazy on it, but some people really loved it. If only that was the case for every release, I’d be a much happier WordPress designer .

Mr.BlogIt: With all the WordPress themes on the net today What Theme is your favorite?
Small Potato: I don’t have a favorite. But if I had to start a blog with a theme by another theme creator, I would go with any theme by Brian Gardner, NDesign-Studio, or iLeMoNeD. There’s a lot more great theme developers out there, but those are the guys that I trust to put out high quality themes at this point.

Mr.BlogIt: What advice would you give a new WordPress theme designer?
Small Potato:If you’re designing free themes for public use then take the time to learn about licenses regarding themes, photos, and images.

Keep your theme designs generic so bloggers will be able to easily modify your themes, unless you’re designing for a client.

One great WP theme = 10 average ones.

Don’t sell sponsored links on your themes for $40-60 each. You’ll sell yourself short. If you’re going after the sponsored links business model then aim for $500 per link on a really great theme. And, don’t forget to allow users to remove that link. Don’t make it a requirement by license to keep the sponsored link.

Mr.BlogIt: If you were not developing WordPress themes, what would you spend your time on?

Small Potato:I’ve always been into web design and building websites from the ground up. Developing WordPress themes is just a recent hobby. Right now, I’m going after this 1 million dollar challenge that I volunteered for back in March, 2007. Basically, I have to accumulate 1 million dollars by December 23, 2009.

Mr.BlogIt: What kinds of things do you do with your free time?
Small Potato:Read stuff, watch MMA fights, spend some time with my girlfriend, exercise, and sleep.

To learn more about Small Potato and his themes visit his website http://www.wpdesigner.com/

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I plan to offer up a weekly feature. This feature will cover one WordPress theme designer every week. I will highlight their themes and interview them.

I will delve into their background to determine what brought them to this field, what keeps them going, and what types of tools they use to get their job done.

To do this justice I will need your help. I need everyone to help. How can you help? I want to produce the type of content that you will want to read and enjoy. Maybe even get something more out of it.

So here is where you come in. Comment here! Tell me what you want to know about these designers. Suggest designers for me to profile. Really any suggestions you could give would be gleefully accepted.

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miloIIIIVII has been developing WordPress Themes since late 2006. She has designed more than 60 themes for WordPress. Her most downloaded theme is HAL 5. Here is a quick glance of her more popular themes:

HAL 5

HAL is a three column fluid layout with a custom header. The header image is a painting done by miloIIIIVII, herself.
Preview | Download

Solitude 5

Solitude is a three column fluid theme for WordPress with a custom painting by miloIIIIVII.

Preview | Download

miloIIIIVII most recent them is:

Dust 3.17

Dust is a fluid three column outfit: adjusts itself on browser size.

Preview | Download

Interview with miloIIIIVII

Could you tell us a little about yourself?

Surfer chick from Great Britain (yes we have some water), worked for several graphic design and PR companies in Britain as well as in Germany

Tell us what it was like to do your first WordPress theme?

Very hard, as I had no idea of php, so I had to learn how WordPress is using php to work in
its own code.

Do you primarily develop your own designs or port others to WordPress?

I NEVER port other designs, all my templates are originally me, but I do take inspirations
from CSS galleries.

What software do you use to develop your WordPress themes?

Notepad light for the code, Photoshop for the background/images
as well as online validating services and some webmaster tools.

How much time do you take with each theme?

From a few hours to a few days, depends on my idea and how I can nail it to a WP design.

What is your favorite WordPress theme you designed, and why?

Always the latest one, as it’s fresh and new.

With all the WordPress themes on the net today What Theme is your favorite?

Dark Black from one more revision, a ported version from the original by bartelme/ilemoned

What advice would you give a new WordPress theme designer?

hmm, I think, I shouldn’t give any advice, as I am learning every day new things,
maybe one: keep your mind open to new ideas.

If you were not developing WordPress themes, what would you spend your time on?

ohh, I do create joomla, type pad, movable type and expression engine templates too, as well
as logo works, so it’s not only the WP works at my schedule.

What kinds of things do you do with your free time?

kite surfing at chiem see or lago di garda.

You can learn more about miloIIIIVII and her themes from her website http://milo.peety-passion.com/

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