that said, WordPress, from that list, is indeed the best!
Take the top 20 admin themes from Themeforest and compare them to the UI/UX of 20 randomly selected YC companies. Not the front page; the actual UI.
Reasonable people will disagree which one wins.
But what's crazy about that is that the Themeforest stuff costs twelve dollars†, and is available instantly.
Desktop software developers don't have inferiority complexes about how samey their apps look. In fact, refined sameyness is a point of pride among Cocoa devs! But for some reason, every web app needs to be designed by Shepard Fairey and Khoi Vinh to launch.
By all means, contract Fairey and Vinh. But do it after you launch the product and start making money. Your initial users do not give a fuck about this issue. If you are not a natural, fluent designer, you will lose tens of thousands of dollars of your time (and, worse, money) just so you don't look like someone else's CMS skin... which none of your real customers will notice.
† Admittedly more if you need an all-purpose license, but still 1/10th what a designer costs.
Rather than wrack my brain and carefully come up with a scoping document laying out all the pages and functionality in my next application --- a document that will be out of date exactly one customer meeting after I write it --- I'm just going to point my next designer at a $12 Themeforest theme and say "do this, but way better".
I don't mind that it costs $5-10,000 to get "better than Themeforest", but I do mind losing weeks of release time sweating whether it's time to pull the trigger on a designer and what exactly to have them do.
99designs is a different story. I don't have the designer's moral problem with spec!work but the misgivings people have about quality and IP infringements are based on real issues. I still think it's a good tool, but I can see why some would avoid it.
Avoiding Themeforest though seems crazy.
For my part, it takes me roughly two hours to:
* Copy all the static assets to their Rails-appropriate locations
* Take the "demo" pages and get them to display reasonably as Erb templates of a Test controller
* Convert the HTML to Haml
* Move content to layouts/application
* Break each feature in the demo out to a partial
There is no other two hours I can spend that gets me as much UI functionality, so I'm a fan.
I have done this three times, and each time found the work of integrating a Themeforest template to be easier than integrating work from graphic designers.
I am careful to work with templates that are HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and that use a grid framework. I can imagine there are many hundreds of themes there that fail one or more of these checkboxes, and that might thus be a nightmare to work with.
it's just the spec work that gets me. that stuff isn't being sold multiple times like prefab themes. college students do spec no matter how much I yell at them and then end up (in terms of time spent) making so little an hour that it's just atrocious.
but, time and a place, etc.
and the type of work I do is very front-end heavy.... tends to go from mvp to beta launch quickly... and we have designers on staff. so, just spoiled. bad bias!
The price point for a very solid HTML5/CSS reasonably-semantic gridded admin theme is $12 to use and $600 for unlimited license. Even the license is a tiny fraction of the cost of any design project.
I am very specifically saying that samey prefabness isn't a liability for web app UI; in fact, I think UX outcome is likely to be superior, since samey prefab admin themes that people will like enough to pay for are all the Themeforest designers tend to build. They're developing palpable expertise.
The liabilities of these themes --- for instance that they are highly non-optimized --- are things that (a) do not matter until you have lots of customers and (b) are not particularly expensive to remediate with contractors after-the-fact.
The liabilities of the DIY approach --- often, a devil's bargain between either waiting weeks or months to get a pro designer to pick up and complete a project, or going to market with a manifestly poor design --- are much higher.
I think for most app devs, not using Themeforest is an expensive, irrational point of pride. It's not good business.
This is a fairly recent revelation for me, so I'm being noisy about it.
The cup I am drinking from would properly also have been considered a major insult to some craftperson a couple centuries ago, but I am perfectly happy paying less in return for something that just works.
As for 99 designs, can we please stop this exploitation bullshit? These people choose to offer their service there.
What most people (not necessarily you) mean when they talk about the exploitation of the designers is that they press down the price - to which all I can say is, welcome to capitalism.
I wish I could do a general reply to everyone (new to HN) but I think I temporarily confused themeforest with themegarden (and similar.) Well, they are all similar, but it's mostly in WordPress that the prefab stuff really bothers me. For quick 'gotta get the point across' for html5 or trans to ruby or whatever, yeah, themeforest definitely makes sense.
We deal with mostly very design-heavy, frontend-ish startups, where I work, so that may be why we hate spec and prefab work so much. We value originality but YES most definitely agreed, there's a time and a place for it!