Winners of the Nettuts+ Anniversary Competition Announced!
I’m both super excited and sad to announce the winners of our first annual Anniversary competition! Why sad, you might ask? This contest was extremely close – close enough to delay this announcement for two days! As our contestants are aware, I intentionally introduced a grand prize that was far beyond the second through fourth place prizes. Knowing that, it became essential to spend as much time as possible determining the true champion. Each of the templates listed below were deserving of the first place seat, but only one could be crowned.
Many factors were considered when deciding: aesthetics, documentation, coding practices, average sales per day, etc. So without further ado, here are the best of the best.
Thanks again to our sponsors: MediaTemple, E Text-Editor, and Packt Publishing. We’re all huge fans of the services you offer.
5th Place: COZA
By: Zigmat
Coza — xHTML/CSS template which went through the first version Cozacoza PSD template. It is perfect for portfolios, magazines, blogs and etc.
Prizes Awarded
- $50 credit to be used on all of the Envato Marketplaces
- 3 Month Plus Membership
- Exposure on Nettuts+ and ThemeForest.net
4th Place: PLATINO
By: Stefano Gilibeti
Platino is a clean and professional html template ideal for softwares, online services and applications websites, or just anything else.
Prizes Awarded
- $50 credit to be used on all of the Envato Marketplaces
- 3 Month Plus Membership
- Exposure on Nettuts+ and ThemeForest.net
3rd Place: FOLIOTASTIC
By: Justin Scheetz
Foliotastic is a feature-packed portfolio/blog theme that includes a full-featured, tabbed Admin Panel to change numerous options like colors (you can even enter your own custom HEX value), category settings, logo settings and more.
Prizes Awarded
- $75 credit to be used on all of the Envato Marketplaces
- 3 Month Plus Membership
- 1 copy of E-Text Editor
- Exposure on Nettuts+ and ThemeForest.net
2nd Place: WORDFOLIO
By: Akay
WordPress + Portfolio = Wordfolio, a wordpress theme which is suitable for graphic & web designers. Special thanks to Jon for his Badass WordPress Logo tutorial.
Prizes Awarded
- $125 credit to be used on all of the Envato Marketplaces
- 12 Month Plus Membership
- 1 copy of “jQuery UI 1.6″, by Dan Wellman
- Exposure on Nettuts+ and ThemeForest.net
Grand Prize Winner: ICONIC
By: Brandon Jones
This theme is a complete site, designed from the ground up to promote anything from a corporate business to a portfolio site. Here’s what you get with your purchase:
An enormous congratulations goes out to to Brandon Jones. In addition to the wonderful sales he’s currently experiencing on ThemeForest.net, he’ll also receive the following as our grand prize winner!
2 Years Media Temple RAGE Server – $2000 Value!
Media Temple hosts websites. Big and Small. For years we’ve taken complex technology and simplified it for the everyday website owner. Our products are designed to be powerful, affordable and relevant. Please take a look around; perhaps (mt) is a good choice for your next project.
1 copy of E-Text Editor
E is a new text editor for Windows, with powerful editing features and quite a few unique abilities. It makes manipulating text fast and easy, and lets you focus on your writing by automating all the manual work. You can extend it in any language, and by supporting TextMate bundles, it allows you to tap into a huge and active community.
12 Months Membership to our Plus Program
If you’re enjoying our Tuts+ sites, you’ll love Plus. For a low monthly fee you’ll get access to an exclusive members site complete with hundreds of source files from all your favorite tutorials, special Plus-only tutorials that everyone else doesn’t get and regular bonus downloads of vector and brush packs, layer styles, tools and more.
$200 Credit Towards the Envato Marketplaces
Whether you’re in need of site templates, Flash files, audio samples, or icons, the marketplaces have you covered!
1 Copy of jQuery UI 1.6
Build highly interactive web applications with ready-to-use widgets of the jQuery user interface library.
1 Copy of Learning jQuery 1.3
Revised and updated for version 1.3 of jQuery, this book teaches you the basics of jQuery for adding interactions and animations to your pages. Even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left you baffled, this book will guide you past the pitfalls associated with AJAX, events, effects, and advanced JavaScript language features.
Featured Author of the Week on ThemeForest
Another Competition in the Books
So there you have it; the best of the best. Not only will these authors, and everyone else, enjoy wonderful sales on ThemeForest.net, but they’ve also earned the admiration and respect of their peers. Thanks again to everyone who entered. This was an extremely tough decision that honestly came down to a few votes. So until next time…
To all of the winners: please email nettutsblog@gmail.com to receive your prizes.
- Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the NETTUTS RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.
Enjoyed this Post?
Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!
By Jeffrey Way
Premium Members
Source Files, Bonus Tutorials & More for all relevant Tuts+ sites in one subscription. Join Now
Related Posts
Premium Membership
Source Files, Bonus Tutorials & More for all relevant Tuts+ sites in one subscription
Rockstar WordPress Designer
Now updated for WordPress 3.0, this classic book on WordPress theming and design has sold over 3500 copies! Get yours now!
Balazs Koch / photographer - More
Web Basix
Just getting started? Start with our basix tutorials on the fundamentals. View All Basix Tutorials
Other Plus Sites ...
aetuts+ audiotuts+ vectortuts+ tuts+ phototuts+ cgtuts+ nettuts+ psdtuts+ activetuts+ mobiletuts+Create a Tutorial, Get Paid!
Have something to teach the world? Want to earn money doing it? Tutorials, screencasts, and articles published here on Nettuts+ are largely contributed by readers just like you! We'll pay you great money for good content. Find Out More
Congrats! You won with a good one. Have fun with the prices.
Congrats to Brandon Jones and to all the other amazing designers!
Well done all!
Congratulations to Brandon! Great template!!
All the entries above are really impressive, can’t have been easy to choose a winner!!
Great job by all!
ICONIC… Really? *Lost for words*
That’s really mean of you to say. The Iconic template is fantastic, and is selling very well on ThemeForest. Hopefully, you’ll find your words soon.
Brandon here – Hi Kagd, strange comment to post publicly, but I was a little shocked that I won too – not because I didn’t work incredibly hard on the design, coding, marketing, support, and updates for Iconic, but because there were so many other great, high quality templates in the running that I just figured one of the more established authors would have taken the gold.
That said, I wouldn’t have submitted my design if I didn’t honestly stand behind it, and 2 major revisions later, I feel that it represents some of the stronger work currently offered on the marketplace. There were several other templates in the contest that I could have easily seen winning, but I’m incredibly happy that Iconic was selected in the end and I’m proud to be the author.
Congratulations to everyone else who won, as well as the other themes that were submitted that aren’t showcased here – I’m sure this was an incredibly hard decision for the reviewers.
Oh, and happy anniversary to nettuts, as this was the main purpose of the contest
I voted ICONIC as #1 but what’s so mean about what kagd said?
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and it’s not like he/she is insulting the template. It’s just not their taste at all, and they are expressing it. PERIOD
Nice work Brandon, and nyce reply too (keep making design not war)
I was thinking about putting together a template to enter, and then I looked through themeforest and saw the designs by Brandon Jones… I then decided that I didn’t leave myself enough time to try and beat such a stellar design (Not that I could have, given tons of time!!!). Glad to hear it won! Congrats Brandon!
Wow, great job.
That is so generous of Envato.
Congrats to all winner! (Personally think 2nd place should have won it all, but like Iconic as well)
Oh trust me. It was really close between the top three.
They’re all great in their own ways! Love em!
To all of the winners: please email nettutsblog@gmail.com to receive your prizes.
The Media Temple RAGE Server is seems really exiting. Congrats to the winners.
They’re all pretty good, but I think 4th took the bag easily. Let them know that they can all have 25% off a PSDtoWP.com order, and the winner can have a free order (100% off)
Cheers
WOW nice prize and congrats to the winners!
Who ever is getting those jQuery books, is a very lucky person!
Congrats to all the winners!
congrats all!
congrats to all the winners
Congratulations to y’all!
Well done to Iconic and the runners up, and specially well done to Envato for being so generous in regards to the prizes!
Congrats, all templates were sick and could’ve gone either way. More contests like this are a must. Really pushes peoples skills to the limit and makes for great community based work.
Good job everyone
Congratulations to all the finalists. They are all very effective and pleasant designs.
Only thing lacking in the winner is hover effects on the image buttons and ‘current’ effects on the navigation links.
Congratulations everyone!
Alll the winners should be very happy with themselves. Iconic is a fantastic template!
Congratulations!
Thanks for everyone who participated & congratulations to all of the winners! This contest truly showcases just how much high quality work is available at ThemeForest, and I don’t doubt that the final judging was neck and neck for the winners.
sales is the name of the game, but wordfolio was jawdropping. lesson learned…KISS (keep-it-simple-stupid).
Congratulations to the winners of this contest, You’ll deserved it
congrats to the winners, im thinking a WordPress competition is in order next
Congrats to the winner
Hey you made a mistake in the linking to mediatemple, you put this
http://www.mediatemplet.net/
please fix,:P
@Chris Robinson: Indeed! A wordpress competition would be a great followup to this contest.
Yea…
the simple one should be a winner..
hard to decide the best one from second and first place-
congrats, Brandon!
congrats to everyone who won, t’was a really challenging competition, but Iconic blew all of them away with it’s awesomeness :p
Congrats to all winners , Your templates are good !
Congrats!
All the best dudes…..
Usefully use the prizes!
I think that the first two prizes are interchanged!
my winners arranged as per above 2,4,1,5,3
It sounds like the top 3 were incredibly close – I can’t say why Iconic got the edge (it’s beautiful, I’d call it a tie with Wordfolio, maybe the fact that it comes with a variety of colors out of the box?), but all of the winners deserve the recognition that they are getting right now. Great work everyone! Congrats!
Iconic is amazing, too bad it isn’t out for WordPress, otherwise I’d buy it right now.
congratulation guys! and have fun with the prices!
These all look great.
Akay – love the javascript scroller on that homepage, never seen one that quite works in that way.
Thank you all, its good to be on 2.place
Congratulations to yourself – excellent work!
Congratulations too mate, have a good works
Excellent work and its so nice to see that simple, usable designs are what turns people on these days.
All of them are beautiful, i can only imagine how difficult it would have been to decide for the judges
Only 5th… Uhh… Congrats to all!
Great Job everyone! But i have to say…ICONIC??? THat was the choice. The design feels a little over used if you ask me. Seems to be a very play it safe design.
But never the less congrats to all!
Funny. That reminds me of people who complain about a band because they get popular after writing good music that appeals to a lot of people. This was a template competition, not a ‘wild and crazy’ design competition. Templates should be safe, usable, flexible, and easy for a customer to pick up and run with. I’ve got plenty of the alternate ‘go big or go home’ designs in my portfolio, but the very nature of the template is that it’s elegant, functional, and uncluttered, which is what I set out to do with Iconic
I hope that provides a little bit of clarity. I know, I know, we all want design to push the bleeding edge of legibility, but sometimes a simple, utilitarian approach is the key to a usable design – especially with web templates. I think the thing that ties all of the finalists together is that they all have that sort of mass appeal that lends themselves out to a variety of potential projects. Thanks for the congrats nonetheless!
Can someone please tell me where i can find those PLATINO-like icons?
I don’t know guys. This is not right. Something is not right here and I’m losing respect for Envato and/or judges.
Why asked people to vote if you are not going to respect and count their opinion?
ICONIC received only 15 votes as #1.
vs
FOLIOTASTIC, which received 52 as #1
and
WORDFOLIO, which received 44 votes as #1
I was surprised to see ICONIC winning it all.
Sorry guys, but I’m dissapointed.
Congrats to all winners.
Particularly to Akay. A Beautiful wordpress theme and all around great guy!!!
Congratulations dude! There were tons and tons of amazing themes here, and I hope they all get put up to download or buy because I would most definitely buy some. Great job everybody!
Congrats I will..
Ain’t agree… The 5th place worth 1st.
I liked #5, but I notice it is not selling well (as of June 11. 2009), not sure why
Al