Our recent interview with Sean McGrath proved hugely successful, and so, we have decided to start a complete new section here at Web Tips Magazine – Interviews. We have some awesome interviews lined up from various freelancers in the coming months so be sure to keep an eye on this section.

Let’s kick of our new interview by focusing on Jonathan Atkinson. Jonathan’s story begins in a small town in Lancashire, England.  He started off selling games out of a gas station and built that up to be one of the top 20 Playstation Centre’s in the country.  When that challenge was conquered, Jonathan decided to see if he could live the ‘All American Dream’ and move to Ohio, with his US born wife.

Coming to the USA in 2000, he was penniless.  While going through immigration, which is a another long story he tells us, he decided he wanted to go back to his roots of Art and Design, since it was after all, the Major he took at Nelson & Colne College.  So he found a little website called Elance and decided to join the masses and try out his luck.  It wasn’t long after his first couple of projects that he started a career on what would go on to be his “calling”.

Jonathan has graduated from logo design, basic HTML websites and 30 second flash files shown at movie cinemas, on to Apple Motion, email templates, and now Word Press themes.  Expanding his business from Theatre web sites, to complete websites, online application design, and GUI design.

“I like to say to people that I make things look pretty – logos, websites, user interfaces, print materials and I even create animated pre-movie advertisements for movie theaters, plus I design online applications for my day job and look after the servers and a family of websites.”

Jonathan also went on to tell us what inspires him:

“I don’t have any particular people that inspire me as such, I just love clean usable design, whether that is a can of soda or a print magazine all the way to architecture and movies – I tend to gain inspiration from as many places as I can and none traditional inspiration from something not affiliated with web design etc is always a great source.

Inspiration from unusual sources, as I said before blending one media with another in style and user interface is a great obsession of mine and seeing the HDR images, flickr focus and interviews on here is a great source for improving your skill sets.”

Personal goals for Jonathan for 2010 include more Word Press themes.  He’s keen to raise the bar on his Themeforest creations.  Jonathan tells us to watch his Themeforest account for new and upcoming projects he already has in mind.

Take a look at some of Jonathan’s fresh cool and eye-catching pieces:

Over at imjustcreative a new article showcases 4 beautiful minimal WordPress themes from designer Justin Marcus. These gorgeous minimal themes are 100% free and can be used for both commercial and personal projects (donations are more than welcomed!). I’m a sucka for clean design, but these are really great examples. Even if you are not a fan of this style they are great themes to build up from, to personalize your way without all the fluff being there immediately – go grab the wordpress themes now and read the full article at imjustcreative

Well known for their awesome, and abundant collection, of free stuff – Smashing Magazine has released another wonderful freebie for us all in their latest post. SimpleFolio is a completely free (yes even commercial use!) WordPress theme for all of it’s readers and provides a solid clean appearance with many options and is perfect for a portfolio or personal site.

Today we are glad to release a beautiful, simple and clean portfolio WordPress theme — SimpleFolio, designed by Omar E. Corrales and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. SimpleFolio is a portfolio theme that includes a blog and a very extensive option page that allows you to exclude all your portfolio items from the blog page. It also includes a front page slider.

It has 2 different widget areas and threaded comments, and also supports paged comments and has 2 different page templates for advanced usage. The control of images is done from the post page.

Features

• CSS-based layout
• 2 columns of fixed width
• widget-ready
• XHTML 1.0 Transitional valid
• multi-browser compatibility: tested on Firefox, Safari , IE7, IE8, Chrome
• easy to setup, theme options page

Grab your FREE copy right here at Smashing Magazine!