We'd like to officially welcome a new member of our theming team, Jay Wolf!

Yes, we have stolen him away from his plans for world domination, and perhaps delayed his efforts toward contributing a theme starting with every letter of the alphabet to Drupal.org. Jay has recently joined our team as a full time themer and the fruits of his labour are just starting to show.

Jay is a long time member of the Drupal community, and you may remember him from such themes as Amadou (which I have often recommended to people as an awesome theme), Barron, Celju, and Golden Hour. He'll be assisting us in turning our designs into awesome, feature rich Drupal themes.

Thanks Jay, for joining us, and for being just as picky about your CSS as we are!

Members of the Drupal community participated yesterday at a gathering of journalists interested in news+technology. Drupal was showcased as an excellent tool for building news websites. You may have already seen some of the big news/magazine sites out there running Drupal, like The Onion, NY Observer, and Fast Company, but there were a few others that caught my eye.

NWSource, a gorgeous site for the Seattle area.  Couldn’t look less like Drupal.

The Columbia Spectator, a classic news site, very elegant and clearly making great use of Drupal’s content organization tools.

The Vineyard Voice, a community news site, which shows that a little can go a long way when polishing a Drupal site.

Themes for Drupal news websites

We’ve had a lot of interest in journalism-related Drupal themes, for newspaper, magazine, and local community sites.  We’re working on some of these now and would love your input (comment here or give us a shout) if you’re building a news site and could share more about what you are looking for! 

Another two new themes added to the TNT collection. Rock Star is dark, rich, and edgey with a palette of reds and blacks, while Legal Papers is an elegant, clean, and professional theme laid out in greys and burgundies. An ideal pair of themes for artists and professionals of all stripes.

After a whole lot of work, we’ve finally launched the all-Drupal TopNotchThemes online store!

And we’re just getting started.

Drupal is an amazing content management system.  It is arguably the most powerful open source CMS available.  Just as important, it’s got a large and vibrant community of contributors and professionals who are constantly improving Drupal and deploying it everywhere.

We’ve been privileged to be participants in the Drupal revolution as themers, both independently and for leading development firm CivicActions.

The more we’ve grown to appreciate the power of Drupal, the more we’ve tried to find ways to make it look as great as it performs.  We’ve enjoyed theming some amazing sites (including Amnesty International, WITNESS, and MeNotMeth), but have been wanting to find a way to make great Drupal designs and theming available to people, organizations, and businesses who don’t have the budget for a fully-customized theme. 

Unfortunately, the power and flexibility of Drupal also make it a challenge to create themes that have a strong graphic personality, yet adapt to changes in content and layout.  Creating a distinctive Drupal theme for one site and one client is challenging enough; creating one for an unknown number of different sites is something else.

But we were determined.  Our goal is to provide a wide selection of unique themes for different types of sites.  The themes need to be powerful without requiring extra modules to be installed, flexible without becoming generic, pre-themed for essential Drupal modules, and well documented for those who aren’t intimately familiar with Drupal.  All at a price in line with the other costs involved in setting up a website you can be proud of. 

We think that we’ve struck a good balance on these requirements and we’re looking forward to delivering a reqular stream of high-quality themes to the Drupal community every month.

Join us as we do our part to make Drupal as beautiful as it is powerful.

In addition to our theme store, we’d like to proudly announce the first TNT Drupal Theme Contest! We’re awarding $1,000 in cash to the top GPL-licensed Drupal themes created by YOU for the Drupal community! More details are coming, but get ready to turn the Drupal theme world on its head, and sign up for our newsletter to get notified as soon as we post the full details.