MacThemes Redesign
It’s been in the works for forever, and thanks to some amazing work by David Lanham and Renn of Atacama Design, the new look for MacThemes is finally ready to be shown off. Of note, the nav bar itself probably took us a good three weeks to figure out as we had to come up with something functional and fitting in with the whole “designer’s desk” theme we have going. Some of you designers out there can probably sympathize with the headaches the site’s visual metaphor caused. But it’s all good now.
To check out the designs, visit the just-started thread over at MacThemesForums here. MacThemes should be back up and running better than ever before by October. The cool part? This is only the first of some pretty cool GUI customization related news to come. I should have some pretty big news for you guys in the next week or two. 
Comments
Up until this point, there have been 11 responses to “MacThemes Redesign”:
w00t! Hard work pays off 
Glad to see everything we’ve been chatting about behind the scenes go public! This is going to be great Cheers!
Looks pretty impressive, I kinda wish I were online a bit more to help with out a bit – it was kinda fun last time-round.
Looks great. Good job guys.
Wow, great design guys. That ruler nav is frakin’ hott!
Looks great, did David Lanham design your blog too? They look similar yet both are excellent.
Pretty site
I like it overall, but I don’t really like the lined paper for the main page. The text won’t align correctly :-/
The craftsmanship is nice, each portion is pretty in itself, but the overall design could need some work. If this is a draft, then maybe you are already thinking along these lines and can find support in the fact that someone else is thinking the same.
* The ruler is pixel art, but the rest is regularly smoothly drawn.
* The left border is extremely fat with layers on layers of border elements (wood, black, paper, binder, finally content)
* Page curls on all papers, as to say “Hi, I am a paper. You’ll know this because of my curled corners.” Perhaps there are better ways to signal “paperness” than the curls. Also, not all of them are well done. In particular, not fond of the bottom left binder paper corner.
* The ripped paper pages with coffee stains from the articles on the main site is a good example of “paperness” without curled corners. Well done!
* The pencil is round, yes? If so, then it should not have an irregular “shave” like a wave, it should too be round. Overall, the pencil is a bit undetailed.
* Maybe the pencil needs not to be on both the main site and the forum. Maybe another drawing tool on one site. Keeping the desk metaphore, removing paper articles, post-its and adding a big binder, generally shifting around lots of stuff on the desk, should maybe push away a small pencil. Now, everything moves and the small pencil is like concrete, not moving a single pixel. Makes it feel like it is bolted to the desk.
* At first glance, I didn’t relly “feel” the desk. I thought the wood was some kind of Garage Band-like decoration. Something with the shadow on top of it makes the wood feel like a rounded corner… Could be just me though.
A bit sparse on the “congrats” here..saving that for when you open the site. 
Looks awesome, ever think about making iWeb templates?
Looks great! Nice job.
Codie Westphall
September 02nd, 2006 at 10:23pmverry nice there Phill, and well im not that big on pimping out my interface look but i actually might start doing it and register on the forums there too, dunno why i neva did it before. great layout though, i feel….inspired to make my own