Interview With Darren Hoyt of Pro Theme Design + Giveaway

Darren: I first discovered the web in 1995 and started building websites in 1998. Mostly medium-sized business and university stuff.

In 2005, I started dividing my time more often between working for an agency and experimenting with freelance projects. Since then I’ve launched a WP theme store, a Q&A site, and other small WordPress-related things. I’ve also been designing iPhone apps.

In 2009 I went full-time freelance, then recently went part-time at arc90 here in New York. I think I like designing in these different capacities to prevent burnout.

Darren: I have a lot of fun making scripting languages do what I want them to do, but I’d never consider myself a coder in that sense. I was drawn to WordPress because of the template language and how easy it was to set up sites and bend them into different shapes. It allowed me to bring designs to life, rather than sticking with static ideas. EE and Drupal are both great, but I still think WP’s speed and ease-of-use is superior for someone with my needs.

Darren: Ironically what makes us stand out is a low-key approach. We don’t want to bombard anyone with endless hype. Ben and I have established our reputations in WordPress over time and we rely on that to help promote our stuff organically. We want to slowly hone and improve on a small batch of products. We also try to find niches that interest us rather than competing with the boilerplate blog/news layouts.

Darren: The main focus of the last couple has been custom widgets and aggregation. Trying to reassemble all the fragmented parts of the web and social media. Widgets and custom option panels also allow many different layout possibilities in a single theme.

Darren: To be honest, my focus of the last few months has not been premium WP themes. I’ve been working on collaboration/idea-management software for the team at arc90. This is their own custom platform geared toward large companies who want to give a voice to employees, collaborate on ideas, discuss them, assign them, and so on. Right now I’m really enjoying true UI/UX design, a bit different for me, and working with really talented engineers.

Darren: I’ve definitely missed the team dynamic. When you get bogged down with decisions, it’s nice to have a team of really bright people who help you look at things from different angles.

As far as ‘corporate’ in terms of work environment, arc90 is pretty much the opposite. There are client projects, but mostly an emphasis on experimentation and building things simply because they’re useful (ex: Readability). It’s pretty casual and there’s a lot of spontaneity. Speaking of brainstorms, the app we’re working on (Kindling) is all about that: submitting ideas, voting on them, assigning them.

One thing with WordPress is that you’re always trying to build things on top of an existing platform. True that it’s open source and you can always make recommendations and contributions for helping to shape it, but you’re somewhat at its mercy. At arc90 it’s been really fun to build an original platform and control where it goes, design-wise.