Steph and Crhis know their foo. They did the amnesty.org theme for instance: works in all browsers (IE6, IE7, FF, Opera, …) on resolutions from as low as 800x600 and including RTL support! They have an impeccable eye for detail, both in their designs and there code. It’s great to see these fine folks opening up their knowledge, skills and expertise to a broad audience. This is great news for both Drupal and its users.

Well, I feel a bit twofold about this. One one hand: wow, great, finally really beautiful themes! The regular license has a decent price.
But the buyout license appears a bit overpriced to me. Or are those the regular prices for a top theme? I wish I would get paid that much… ;)

Thanks so much for the mention, Rob! We’ve got a lot of effort going into these themes and our site, so I hope it shows. As you pointed out with the economic indicators, I think we’ll see an exploding variety of Drupal-related products and services over the next year.

As for the comment above about price, I would echo what Rob said. I’d also recommend reading this article: http://www.pearsonified.com/2006/06/howmuchshouldadesign_cost.php

30-50 hours have gone into crafting each of the themes you see on our site. We’re looking to provide an alternative to high quality custom themes, which would run you significantly more.

Thanks, eigentor! :) It’s tough to compare. One of the things we’re trying to educate people on is that we’re not selling “just a pretty home page” in a screenshot. These are tested against dozens of block/layout combinations and types of content. It’s so easy for template sites to oversell the promise of a home page screenshot with a header and sidebar, but of course that makes it difficult for us to explain the difference :P

I just realized the link above was b0rked. Here it is corrected: How Much Should A Web Design Cost?

To clear things up - I am a designer myself. And I actually am working (slowly) up the pricing ladder. Everytime I do a new Design, I acually wonder: should this take so long? Will I ever get quicker?

And I think, the answer is yes and no. Yeah, I get quicker. And no, I use the new powers to improve upon the work. So in the end the results get better, but it still takes long.

It is an interesting topic, and thanks very much for the link. You hardly ever hear anyone talking about this topic in a frank and open way. But maybe this is wrong. Because talking about it helps other people to get to know the standards.

What is a difficult point, as Chris also points out in his blog post: Quality in Design and even more CSS is impossible for the Client to evaluate. It is done best when he cannot see it… (the CSS). But I have sometimes people find out the hard way. They have a “cheapo” Designer and Coder work for them, then they turn away and come to me.

I tell ya, it is much easier to talk about prices and quality to those people!

TopNotchThemes launches first all-Drupal high-end theme store

Startup provides instantly downloadable Drupal themes with advanced features. Beautiful, professional-looking Drupal sites now within reach of small businesses and organizations – no designer needed.

April 22, 2008 – Oakland, CA - Collective Mind announced today the official unveiling of its premium Drupal theme store, TopNotchThemes.com. The store provides the first and largest offering of high-end templates for the extraordinarily successful open source content management system, Drupal. TopNotchThemes currently has a wide selection of Drupal themes, optimized for different styles and types of websites, and they will be rapidly increasing the size of their catalog over the coming months.

“TopNotchThemes is a real milestone for the Drupal world: it’s a commercial template store whose designs are built with Drupal’s capabilities in mind. Their commitment to working with the community and their respect for Drupal’s GPL license are both critical. We are all excited to see their library grow!” says Jeff Eaton, developer for Lullabot and member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors.

Quick TNT theme facts:
- Includes multiple configuration options to create different layouts
- Can be uploaded and enabled on a Drupal website in seconds
- Includes built-in support for popular third-party modules
- Crafted by a team of expert Drupal themers

“Over 100,000 people download Drupal every month. It astonished us that there weren’t themes of this caliber already available,” offers co-founder Stephanie Pakrul, on the motivation behind creating TopNotchThemes.

“There are a handful of other commercial Drupal themes out there, but most are either recycled from other platforms or bland, generic themes,” adds co-founder Chris Fassnacht of the new approach taken by TopNotchThemes. “We wanted to offer something designed from the ground up with Drupal in mind, but with the personality, high attention to detail, and features usually only found in custom themes.”

TopNotchThemes is also helping to meet the growing business demand for Drupal by providing the first selection of Ubercart-enhanced e-commerce themes. Ubercart, a feature-rich online store package for Drupal, is quickly becoming a leader among open source e-commerce platforms. Themes and further information are available now at http://www.topnotchthemes.com

About TopNotchThemes
TopNotchThemes is brought to you by Collective Mind, the husband-and-wife duo of Christopher Fassnacht and Stephanie Pakrul. Their theming work with CivicActions recently made headlines with the launch of new Drupal-based sites for Amnesty International and the Emmy-award winning organization, WITNESS. Long-time contributors to the Drupal community, their goal is to make Drupal more accessible to business users and organizations.

Contact info
Stephanie Pakrul & Christopher Fassnacht
Owners, Collective Mind
hello@collectivemind.net
1-415-963-4355

Find us on:
del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/topnotchthemes
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TopNotchThemes
RSS feed of updates: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopNotchThemes