Backstage was first conceptualized by the talented British web designer extraordinaire – Elliot Jay Stocks way back in June. We thought Elliot was well suited for this kind of design as he himself is quite a musical genius.

Fox has spent the past few months, off and on, hard at work creating powerful widget goodness and theme options for Backstage. With custom category templates for the discography, latest news, video and image archives this theme really helps empower artists and bands with the tools they need to promote themselves. An upcoming shows widget helps manage your events, whilst a home page featured slider can easily be enabled/disabled via the theme options panel.

It’s probably best letting the images below, and the demo, do the talking don’t you think?

The glossy cubes alternate style with the feature slider enabled

We hope this theme helps continue to grow our long tail of theme offerings and we look forward to seeing it in action on the interwebs soon. As with any theme please provide us with your constructive feedback so we can continue to improve this beast of a theme.

Have a read over the theme listing and view the alternate styles on the demo switcher before reaching into your pocket for your wallet. Trust us, this theme holds huge potential.

A more muted grey alternate style. Remember it's easy to create your own unique look based on one of our alternate styles as a building block

Note… Whilst these themes’ designs have been finalized and some of them has been coded, there’s no clear ETA on any of their release dates. So it’s not gonna help if you ask us in the comments. All of these themes will however be pushed out in the next 3 months; so even though we’re being vague, you won’t have to wait too long…

Antisocial by Tim van Damme

Antisocial is a hybrid of Tim’s personal “business card website” and a bit of a blog. We’re extremely happy with how this design panned out and we believe this is quite a unique concept in terms of WP themes and what’s available at the moment.

We almost get a kind of “desktop” feel when looking at the design, as there is a kind of “dock” on the left-hand side of the page. That dock will be used to link out to all of your social network profiles, whilst the rest of the design (on the right) mainly takes on the functionality of a traditional blog. The homepage also thus serves as some kind of aggregation space for your activities online and the only element missing from these mockups is a link to a Lifestream page, where you’ll be able to stream all of your activities on those social networks. Anything we’ve missed with Antisocial?

Antisocial - Home

Antisocial - Inner Post

Backstage by Elliot Jay Stocks

Another first for us is Backstage, which is being aimed at bands / musicians / artists. We’ve got some amazing functionality planned for this one and this along with Antisocial will be two of the most unique themes we release in 2009.

There’s however still quite a few question marks (for us) in terms of some of the functionality that we have planned with Elliot. We haven’t decided how we’re gonna handle the music files yet for example or where the “Download Free Tracks” section will pull it’s content from. We are however incredibly excited to get our hands dirty in making Backstage one of the most unique themes of our collection and also the WordPress theming community as a whole.

Backstage - Home

Backstage - Music

Backstage - Home (Glossy Style)

Exposure by FRESH01

Exposure has been based on the success of Aperture and the e-mails we get requesting more photoblogging themes. Again, we’re planning some awesome functionality in terms of widgetizing the whole theme and making it SUPER-customizable!

The idea with the widgets is, to include so many options that it’s gonna come out your ears… Options like displaying posts from a specific tag / category, including a slider for an image section and of course, you’ll be able to use the widget more than once. So in actual fact, there’s just going to be one Master Widget, which will allow you to build your own Exposure. This is most surely ambitious, but we’re sure that we can pull it off (read: Foxinni has got his work cut out for him)!

On another note… We’ve decided to not include a separate written blog in the theme, as we felt that the audience that this theme is aimed at, will be talking via their photos. Obviously every photo can include some text / multimedia content, but the theme won’t have two sections in terms of photos & blog. Thoughts?

Exposure - Home

Exposure - Home (Alternative Widgets)

Exposure - Home (Grunge Version)

SophisticatedFolio by Tony Geer

We love our portfolio + blog combo themes (maybe because we’re all designers at heart), and SophisticatedFolio will be the latest design to join our portfolio themes collection. It’s definitely different to the designs we did before and we’re sure that homepage will wow anyone!

We like the fact that the theme is totally different to our other portfolio themes and the homepage design (especially the featured area) is also a new look in terms of what our existing theme collection offers… Another change-around, is the sidebar that’s actually on the left. So whilst SophisticatedFolio may not be groundbreaking, we believe this is an awesome alternative for our existing portfolio themes.

SophisticatedFolio - Home

SophisticatedFolio - Portfolio

All that’s left is for you to tell us how awesome these concepts are and how excited you are to see them released in the near future… Go on… We know you love them…

More seriously… We’d love to get your constructive feedback on the concepts and if you have any suggestions on the kind of functionality that we should (try) include, we’d love to hear them. Fact of the matter is, the designs are awesome, but if the themes that fit your needs, we’re not doing our job. So tell us what kind of functionality you need from these theme concepts and we’ll do our best to include it!

Now, collaboration aside, we wanted to publish a post, where we could give ourselves a few warm fuzzies, along with a little (innocent) ego-stroking. We contacted some of the designers that we’ve worked with in the past and asked them one simple question: What do they think about their collaboration with WooThemes?

Here’s what they said…

Working with WooThemes is a pleasure every time. The guys run a well-oiled machine but they’re super friendly and always open to new ideas. In fact, the creative freedom the team give their designers is why I enjoy collaborating with them so much, and their respect for designers’ decisions is rarely matched by other clients.

Elliot Jay Stocks – Designer for Proudfolio & Backstage (upcoming)

Some of the nice things (of working with WooThemes) were the creative freedom and trust that was shown to me. Fast responses and feedback also made the process move along very quickly.

Tony Geer – Designer of SophisticatedFolio (upcoming)

WooThemes are awesome to work with. A lot of freedom, correct and stipulate with payments, and good feedback when needed.

Tim van Damme – Designer of Antisocial (upcoming)

The people of WooThemes absolutely let me do my own thing. They actually insisted on it, which makes this collaboration unique for me.

I often work with clients who have boundaries and constraints in place before they ask me to do the design work for their project. Working with WooThemes was totally different—I was free to totally express myself and be as creative as I wanted, while still focusing on solid graphic design. Their attitude and trust definitely made it a fun and cool experience. I was even able to name the theme. Because the experience was so great, I feel honored to have my name attached to this project.

Veerle Pieters – Designer of Abstract

Working with WooThemes achieved, if not getting really close to achieving, the perfect relationship between client and designer. They know what their market would like and provide the proper boundaries so that the end product is in-line with expectations without hampering creativity. It’s no wonder I constantly prod them for another opportunity, I had a blast working with them.

Bryan Veloso – Designer of Suit & Tie

WooThemes do a fantastic job of letting your creativity come out. I think they embraced my ideas and really gave me a lot of freedom in the design work. As creative people themsleves they understand the pressures on the designer, and realize how important it is to give proper ideas, feedback and communication. Probably the most pleasant working experience I’ve ever had.

Liam McKay – Designer of Papercut, Ambience & Cushy

Working with the WooThemes fellas wasn’t like working for a client at all. They provide some basic features they wanted to see in the theme, and a general direction, then basically said, “Go!” The design process was quite nice, since all three of them are designers themselves. If I was ever stuck on a detail or needed someone to bounce ideas off, they were quick to open up and return with helpful suggestions and feedback.

Matt Brett – Designer of THiCK

So based on that, I think it’ safe to say that we’re a pretty cool bunch to work with… What do you think?

So the last time we posted some teasers, was way back in March this year (here & here) and from those lists we still have Feature Pitch & “Big Easy” (from Dan Rubin) in the backlog. Feature Pitch will be released next week and then Big Easy, along with Groovy Photo & Blog (from last year’s WooContest) have been scheduled for release next month. (Don’t hold us to that, because we’re a fickle bunch hehe…)

For this post then, we’ve got 4 amazing new theme concepts that we’re working on. You’ll see that we’re only showing you very small teasers in Part 1, but as soon as all 4 concepts are completed, we’ll be publishing more in-depth teasers of the upcoming themes. So here we go (in alphabetical order)…

Some Max Voltar awesomeness

Antisocial by Tim van Damme

We’ve been in love with Tim’s network design ever since we first saw it and apparently we’re not the only one’s that have wanted to create a design inspired by his original work. So we’ve been working with Tim to create a design which includes all of his network design’s elements, along with a little blogging & lifestreaming. The result is a very early concept called “Antisocial”, which is totally unique to anything we’ve released before. [Tim has also given his blog followers a little preview here.]

VIP Access

Backstage by Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot finally makes a comeback and Backstage will be his second contribution to WooThemes (only because we love Elliot & Proudfolio has been a very popular theme among you lot). Since Elliot has had multiple affairs into the music scene, we thought it would be great to ask him to fill another gap in our theme collection; a design that would primarily work for musicians, artists & bands. The result? An amazing new concept – Backstage – which comes in 3 different style flavours (grunge, glossy & minimalist). You really want this theme (too)…

Great photography exposed

Exposure by FRESH01

And yes… We are still designing in-house as well… Cobus (FRESH01) only joined our little team earlier this year and whilst he’s been responsible for polishing both of my recent themes (The Station & Feature Pitch), he hasn’t contributed his own, unique design yet. But that is officially changing when we’ll be releasing Exposure in the coming months. Exposure is a photoblog design (guess, you could use it as a digital portfolio as well) and has been heavily influenced by the popularity of Aperture. The idea was for Exposure to have a really minimalist feel (even though Cobus has already designed a grunge style alternative as well) and totally focus the attention on the photos.

Showcase your work

SophisticatedFolio by Tony Geer

Personally I’ve always been a fan of Tony’s work and I was pleasantly surprised a while back when we got an e-mail from him, suggesting a little collaborative design effort. We have thus been working with Tony on a new portfolio (and blog) design, which should draw a lot of inspiration both from his current design, as well as the previous iteration, which got a lot of linklove from design galleries. SophisticatedFolio is thus just an upgraded offering on our already-great range of portfolio themes, since we haven’t released a portfolio theme in quite some time.

What you waiting for?

If you haven’t joined WooThemes yet, you really need to think long & hard about why you’re not sharing in this fun. We think the above teasers are enough evidence that things here at WooThemes are only gonna get better and the themes collection is sure to hot up towards the end of year.

In addition to these themes, we’re also negotiating more collaborations with some top-notch designers. Magnus (who hasn’t designed a theme for a while) also has a new theme concept in the works (a design that was initially used as an early iteration for WOO2) and rumours suggest that Mark is designing the follow-up to Aperture. So you’re missing out on the fun if you’re not involved…

OH: and how awesome are those teasers? Bet you can’t wait for Part 2…

Elliot now joins myself, Magnus Jepson & Mark Forrester as the four core members of the WooThemes Design & Development team. Essentially what this means, is that we get to decide what happens around here… From my experience of working with these 3 guys on the development of WooThemes, I can assure you that there’s a helluva lot of exciting things to come in the following months.

It is our belief that Elliot will add significant design experience to our activities, whilst also bringing his own unique style (which is different to ours) to the WooThemes table. Ultimately our members and customers will be the beneficiaries of this – so keep watching this space…