First of all, note the ample use of negative space. I’m going to avoid calling it “white” space because it’s not always necessarily white. I think it’s great that there are download links right there on each page—no need to travel through layers just to get the damn theme.

Also: permalinks. This is nice. For example, if I mention how you can comment/vote on themes, I can also say, Hey, go and vote for blog.txt, Simplr, Barthelme, veryplaintxt, plaintxtBlog, etc. You get the idea. Very useful for theme authors.

Observations

A couple comments are warranted too. While the design is really wonderful, just the kind of site I enjoy, there is something that I envision differently. For example,

Looks great, right? Well, it does. But I see a thumbnail and wonder what this theme is. Have I seen it before? Is that a new Hemingway theme? And so on.

The theme title is shown (1) in the link title and (2) on the theme page. I can argue, however, that the name of a theme is its least important detail. Well, it is. Is the mouse-over text suffecient? Probably.

My final observation is related to the ever-so-cool permalinks. Let’s say my Simplr theme needs an update.

So I write a nice e-mail to Thomas with the new theme ZIP attached. Let’s say version 1.4.1. He updates it. Everything is beautiful—except the permalink. For example, the Simplr permalink is http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/1-column/23/simplr-11b/, but the current version is actually 1.4.1.

However! I can just use the permalink http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/1-column/23/, sans the theme name/version, to get the same result.

Overall, well done Thomas.