THiCK was designed by the self-confessed, punk rock designer – Matt Brett. This was the first time that we have worked with Matt and he is also probably the most-popular and most-established designer with which we have collaborated. And we can honestly say that Matt lives up to this glowing reputation as rockstar designer – the design of THiCK is awesome and the CSS superior to most websites you will find out there. So kudo’s to Matt for helping us create an incredible theme!

DESIGN

We asked Matt to create an uber-personal blog theme, which resembles the thinking and principles behind the redesign of his own site, which he did a while back. The result is a design that is intended to allow you to take back your own blog and publish all of the various elements that builds your personality (photos, lifestream, your favourites etc.).

The style itself is reminiscent of the style that Matt has become known for… The theme includes both a grunge & clean version, along with the option to use a traditional dark on light approach or a light on dark style. And then you will also have 5 different colour schemes (default – grey, blue, orange, green & pink) to choose from for each of these 4 style options, which makes it 20 possible colour / style combo’s in total.

THE HOMEPAGE

The 4-column grid structure of the homepage acts as a complete “aggregator” of what you are doing online. As mentioned above, we’ve tried to design a theme with a whole lot of personality, which will allow you to really publish yourself online. In our mind, this aspect of THiCK makes it a truly unique theme across the alternatives that are available to you.

FUNCTIONALITY

As with every blog post that announces a new theme, we like to point out one feature that makes this theme different to the other themes we have available. So for THiCK, we’d like to highlight the widget-functionality, along with the truckload of custom widgets we’ve integrated with the theme.

The theme has 3 different widgetized spaces (left and right sidebar, along with the middle column on the homepage), which can either display our custom, THiCK-specific widgets or any default WordPress widgets. For the custom widgets, we’ve included a custom category list, the lifestream widget, asides / sideblog, built-in recent comments, your favourites (Movies, Books etc.), as well as Flickr & Social Media Profiles.

THiCK is probably our second theme (after Over Easy) that integrates such extensive use of widgets and the reason for this, is that we feel it increases your options, as the user of the theme. This approach has been very well received by users of Over Easy and we hope to get the same positive feedback from THiCK users.

ADD SOME PERSONALITY!

So what are you still waiting for? I’m sure that the marketing- / hype speak above, must’ve done the trick and at least prompted you to have a look at the amazing demo of THiCK… Right? Otherwise, read more about the specific features of THiCK if we haven’t convinced you yet…

And as always, we’d love your feedback!

So the first collaboration we’ve lined up is with grunge, design king – Matt Brett. For me personally, this was a major coup, since Matt was one of the first designers that I started to follow when I started to teach myself design / development at the end of 2006. Beyond that though, I’m sure that you’d agree that Matt comes with a big reputation, a signature design style and an awesome portfolio (so exactly the kind of things we’re looking for in a collaborative partner).

The Theme Concept

During the last 2 weeks, Matt has been working on a brand new theme concept for personal bloggers. We decided after a spade of content-heavy themes, we needed to focus on releasing some themes targeted at individual bloggers.

This will also be the first theme that will include lifestreaming functionality – so we’re aiming to release another extremely feature-rich and multi-purpose theme. Along with the lifestreaming, the theme will also contain functionality to include / display your favourite books, games, DVD’s & music within the design – so the focus will be 100% on you, as the blogger (if you have a look at Matt’s own design, you’ll get an idea of what we’re talking about).

So what does the theme look like?

A blog post hyping about a new theme wouldn’t mean anything without some images, so here’s a few to give you an idea of what the finished product will look like… Note that the theme will essentially have 4 distinct styles i.e. Light on Dark Clean, Dark on Light Clean, Light on Dark Grunge and finally Dark on Light Grunge. And obviously all 4 of these styles will come in a few different colour scheme options (isn’t that what you expect from us by now?).

So here are those images:

Teaser #1: This is one of Matt’s original wireframe concepts. We’re using the 960.gs grid again for this one and you’ll see that the design has a nice clean structure to include all of the different features we are planning.

Teaser #2: Doesn’t the wireframe concept above just look so much better with a layer of grungy paint? This is basically the light on dark style with a green colour scheme.

Teaser #3: Just showing off the alternative, cleaner style in both an orange and blue colour scheme.

So what do you think?