We’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with another hugely popular half-English web designer – this time the graphic designer, web developer, musician and Apple enthusiast Dan Rubin. This collaboration has brewed and matured over months and months, in fact we got our first preview of this theme in November last year! Hopefully this demonstrates to a lot of users that we don’t rush our themes in order to release two a month – quality and quantity go hand in hand here at WooThemes.

Dan is a genius when it comes to web design, he gives a lot of careful thought to his designs and with Big Easy his personal style shines through. For his alternate styles to Big Easy he scanned and tweaked an old (circa 1970s) leather case with some lovely stitching, and a book cover from 1934 to form large repeating patterns. For the neat typography Dan introduced us to Cufon and implemented it meticulously with some “graceful degradation of text-shadow” <– You know you are working with a hot shot designer when he throws in words like that!

By April we had the final html/css files from Dan… with a note:

This one really tossed me some strange problems along the way, sorry it took longer to code up than I expected. It’s also been almost a year since I did any serious XHTML/CSS production, and some of the stuff in this template is completely new territory for me (there are a few combinations that I doubt anyone has been stupid enough to try

Looking at the theme now, sitting pretty on our demo server we are so chuffed by Dan’s hard work, and we are sure you are going to love working with it too. Writing the theme documentation this morning I got to really test drive this wonderful theme that Dan neatly coded and Fox managed to work his WordPress magic into. With a completely widgetized home page that can be shuffled around to your pleasing with 3 custom widgets, and 6 custom widgets for the sidebar widgetized space the potential to make this theme your own is really quite limitless.

Enough talk though, have a look at some of those beautiful alternate textures below and then head on over to the theme listing page for more information.

The box alternate style

The case alternate style

A while back we got him to do a collaboration with us on a new theme and we’re no nearing the end of the design process (Dan has already started coding it). The concept is a personal profile space and includes sections to publish your portfolio, along with your other online activities. We’ll also be using Cufon (first time for us) for the custom fonts, which will add a nice typographic style to the theme.

So here’s a bit of a teaser… The theme (which is yet to get a name) will probably be available in the next 2 / 3 months… But we’re open for persuasion on developing this earlier…

Default Home Page - Clean & Dark styling

Default Inner Pages

An example of a heavily textured style

And lastly a clean version of that same alternative colour scheme

Abstract by Veerle Pieters

Yup – you read it right! WooThemes is indeed collaborating with the super-designer, uber-illustrator and industry-leading designer, Veerle Pieters. We approached Veerle about a month ago to get cracking on a new design for us and she has created something truly unique and 100% within her signature style. This is a major coup for us in our attempts to get the best web designers involved with WooThemes in collaborative projects. Any here’s some enticing teasers:

Editorial by Mark Forrester

Well, we can’t let our collaborative partners have all the fun ya’know. Mark has been working on this concept on / off for a while now and we believe that this is definitely a ground-breaking theme in terms of the functionality involved. The theme is aptly called Editorial, since we’re creating a true magazine-vibe, whereby the posts are split into monthly issues, whilst the homepage acts as a Table of Contents of sorts. Here’s the visual low-down:

Cushy by

We don’t have teaser images for this one yet, but we’ve also recently started to work with CSS-guru, Dan Rubin. Dan – who has written quite a few books on web design & CSS – has promised to use some groundbreaking CSS techniques to push the abilities and design aesthetics of our themes to the next level. So we’re also really excited to be working with someone of Dan’s calibre and I’m sure you’ll join us in our anticipation to see what Dan produces..

So what do you think of the new teasers? Do you think that it is worth your time to sign up for The WooThemes Club, considering that we’ll be releasing these beauties (along with the 9 winners from the WooContest) into the wild in the next 2 / 3 months? Maybe you need to evaluate the value of our club in more detail?