Our Magento themes have gone through lot of changes in terms of design, responsive layouts, features and complimentary extensions. 4-years seems long but time flies when the desire to improve is strong. If you look at our first Magento theme and our latest one, you can appreciate how the user demand and availability of new technologies have impacted our deliveries. Skim through our Magento themes showcase, clearly there is a design evolution here. Back in the days our Magento themes were basic and simple with typical 3-column-layout, and now our themes are sophisticated and lively than ever.
In this blog, we are going to look back at each year and review remarkable designs represented by our picked themes.
Though time, our design have evolved significantly
2009: Our First Magento theme - JM PURITY
Magento theme JM Purity with 3-column layout
JM Purity was our very first Magento theme back in 2009 when the market for Magento themes was in its initial stages. The theme has a basic 3-column layout of a default Magento theme, but it won many hearts, simply because it met the demand for a simple and clean store back then. We have updated Purity theme with mega menu and is now available for free our Forum.
2010: first true Magento fashion theme - JM ORES
Magento fashion theme JM Ores
It was not our first Magento theme for fashion stores, but JM Ores was our first change in concept of a Magento theme. No longer used the default layout, we designed Ores with the business login and an ecommerce site in mind. Ores has a simple and clean layout, yet still impressive with Product Slider and Slideshow right on homepage. Using black and strong color as the main gamut, this theme absolutely brings the luxury look to your fashion store. If you go through our Magento themes showcase, you will realize that after this theme, we started using dark color and black background for luxury stores.
2011: A milestone Magento theme - JM ADAMITE
Magento theme JM Adamite with major change in design concept
Beginning of 2011, we released Magento theme JM Adamite and it marked as such an important milestone for us. JM Adamite reflects our changes in concept for Magento fashion stores.
Let’s talk about this theme features first. Adamite supports number of new extensions which we never supported in any previous theme back then. We were greedy! This greediness, however, brought up a powerful fashion store with all the essential features and a plenteous content layout. This also means you have more options to customize the theme.
Caught up with the trend in web design at that time, we used white and bright gamut and effectively applied white space in this Magento theme. This theme concept also was closed to the Minimal design which was popular in later years. Some other themes having the similar style are: JM Tyrolite, JM Mozanis and so on.
Last but not least, what made JM Adamite special was that this was the first Magento theme we started to support free special fonts; and no longer depended on Windows default fonts. With fruitful types of fonts, you can freely personalize the theme.
2012: Pinterest alike unique Magento theme - JM WALL
Magento theme with Pinterest alike layout JM Wall
With JM Wall, we introduced such a pioneering idea, new look for an online store. Inspired by the success of Pinterest, this responsive Magento theme featured Infinite scroll and lazy load in displaying products. You can read our JM Wall feeature blog post for more details about the special features. Thanks to Pinterest layout, we could optimize products: more products are displayed and the focus on them is also enhanced. Now shoppers can go through the store with few clicks away.
Only from JM Wall, minimal design has been truly applied and improved in our themes. The theme is not limited to demo products, you can totally turn it into any store you wish for.
Also in this year, start from JM Zite, we bring responsive design to Magento themes and make it a must have feature for all our later themes.
2013: Modern Magento theme - JM SIOTIS
Modern Magento theme JM Siotis
This year we have been focusing on modern and simple design for our Magento themes. Responsive theme JM Siotis is one of the great example. Siotis is a fashion store with urban style a.k.a street Style, stresses on Graffiti arts, bold and flat typography with different contrasting colorful blocks, less use of white space. This Magento theme, thus, expresses the wind of youth and freedom.
Siotis is also the first Magento theme that supports Off-canvas navigation for the main menu on mobile devices and tablets.
No matter how beautiful the theme is, it's still the matter of personal taste when it comes to customization. That's why starting from JM Flannel (in February), we have integrated Magento Basetheme into our themes, which allows you to freely customize the themes into any color, any style. In this theme Siotis, the Basetheme has been improved a lot and gives you more options in customizing.
Magento Basetheme for better theme customization
So here we are now! From a humble beginning with a basic Magento theme for simple online shopping stores to top notch feature rich responsive magento themes. The design trend for our Magento themes this year is promised to be rich and varied since more and more extensions/features will be supported and unique styles required for them are in place.