Open call to designers, photographers, artists and other creative people!

Since the first free website template was published on andreasviklund.com in October 2005, I have mostly focused on creating and releasing simple, well-coded and generic designs, trying to keep each template neutral in terms of the sample content to allow template users to turn the templates into websites about any imaginable topic. There are lots of examples that show that this neutral and generic approach has been successful and appreciated.

For example, the andreas01 template has, among many other things, been used to run an official NBA team blog, several advanced science websites, numerous sites and blogs about faith and different religions, as family websites for people all over the world, as the base design for university professors, school classes, politicians and even a member of a Royal family. The generic design and the easy customization has made it easy to give the template a specific touch that is relevant to the topics that different template users are working with.

But something has been missing…

While many template users prefer to put their own touch to a generic website template, not everyone want to do it. If I would gather all requests I have got about making topic-specific templates, it becomes obvious that a lot of visitors to this site wants to see templates about specific topics. Those who are looking for a template to build a website about cars, would naturally be searching for car website templates. The same goes for nature websites, financial websites, sports websites and any other topic that could be relevant.

Now, I need your help!

Since andreasviklund.com by now has a large collection of generic templates, it is time to add a new touch to the free template gallery. Soon, I will start releasing new templates with specific topics, hoping to provide more inspiration and new ideas to site builders. But rather than making up topics and designs for all of them, I would like to invite all of you creative people (designers, photographers, artists – well, anyone who loves to create material) to help me out. Is there any talented fashion designer out there who would want to participate in creating a free fashion website template? Or any artists creating beautiful paintings that could be turned into backgrounds and sample content for a series of art website templates? If so, let me know!

I’ll do the HTML/CSS coding, based on material from others who provide input, images and fresh ideas. All contributors will of course be given appropiate credit, both inside the templates and in the template gallery. As a first step, I have been in talks with a talented Swedish nature photographer about making a series of wildlife templates, and with one of my favorite illustrators about making a cartoon-themed template (both of which are designs that I would never be able to make by myself).

Join in, all ideas are welcome!

I do of course also welcome ideas from everyone. What kind of topic would you like to see in a future website template? Share your opinion, either in the comments to this post or by sending me an e-mail.

Also keep in mind that these topic-specific templates will be possible to modify in any way you may want to, so if you find a fashion-themed template that you would want to use for your wedding website – then you can of course do so. The topics are for inspiration, for showing that website templates can look amazing and still be easy to use as starting points for building websites.

I think that it will be an incredibly fun direction to take for the andreasviklund.com template gallery, and that more people will find inspiration and ideas from the templates when topics are added. I also think that it will be a great place for creative people to get their work seen by a lot of people all around the world, as each template gets thousands of downloads.

Sounds exciting, don’t you think?

artistic, fashion, graphics design, templates, themes, topics, trends