Among a great variety of styles in contemporary design, vintage and retro appear more and more often nowadays. You see elements of them everywhere: at advertisements, at CD covers, in fashion and interior design. At web design retro and vintage become more and more popular as well.

There are few presumable reasons for the usage of old-fashioned motifs: sometimes stemming from the content of a website, sometimes out of the need to associate the site with some element from the past, in other cases just the wish of the designer to make the website somehow different and unique. Anyhow, websites developed in retro style look really smashing. Accurately executed, they create a nostalgic atmosphere, wake the memories of the past, finally, they are simply stylish and not boring.

So what are retro and vintage designs made of?

First of all images. Old vehicles, old devices, old packaging, old photos and illustrations from magazines, photos of famous people of the time, old-styled signs, scrapbooks, torn, used yellowish paper with stains textures.

The next important thing is a color palette. It of course depends on the period of time you aim to represent. Dark, dirty colors (brown, dark red, dark blue, bottle-green), yellowish and beige are often used in retro (1910s-1940s) websites, in vintage ones (1950s -1980s) bright, pop-art colors are more often met.

And the last but not the least – retro founts. Typefaces can make your website a masterpiece or completely destroy it. So be careful when choosing a font.

Here are some examples of retro and vintage web templates, developed by our designers:

Well, remember - the best wine comes out of an old vessel. So don’t be afraid to go back in time.

Flashmint.com is here to inform you about its no-membership direction. This fact means that we do not support templates membership idea and offer you to purchase our products without any membership limitations.

The point is when you subscribe on templates membership on some websites you have an access to the fixed category of templates which can be of great amount but with no uniqueness. In case you purchase certain website templates without membership subscriptions your chances to get an exclusive product grow bigger. Flasmint.com is aimed particularly at providing you with high-quality unique website templates and flash templates for the best advance of your future web site.

Downloading templates from members’ categories you do not touch upon all items but choose only several ones which may show that your money is not always justified. It may seem like you paid not for a promised thousand of templates but only for some of them. It can make you think whether it is worth paying such amount of money or not.

For our part, at Flashmint.com we provide premium web site templates and flash templates which are undoubtedly exclusive and unique. You pay only for the products you use and no cent is spent needlessly. Moreover our prices are affordable and competitive, especially if you care about the quality of the product.

And what is not less important collaborating with Flashmint.com you get incredible innovations such as dynamic CMS flash photo galleries, XHTML/CSS templates, SWiSH templates. All highest web design developments which are hard to find among templates membership categories are here at Flashmint.com. No tons of useless items, no membership limitations - just pure qualitative design.

So if you feel that templates membership is not always as reliable as it seems, Flashmint.com is at your service 24/7.

When the results of the contest are processed and summed up, after choosing and awarding the winner, we are finally glad to present you a great renewal – our updated design!

We are really happy about that. Our special gratitude to the winner of the contest – the very creator of Flashmint’s Blog new appearance!
But don’t worry – this was not the last opportunity. We promise to impress you with new not less interesting contests and valuable prizes!

P.S. We have some additional information for you. Our blog is in the test mode now, please feel free to post your comments.

First I would like to say that we make our customers life easier What I mean is that we always do our best to ease the editing process of flash templates. We have good collection of flipbook templates but all of them are simple flash templates, you need to know the flash to modify the content, add the pages etc. Now you have the chance to get dynamic flipbook templates. Here is the brief overview.

Why choosing flip books?

Dynamic flip book templates give the customer unique opportunity to build eye catching and user friendly website within a couple of hours. You can add as many pages as required without deep knowledge of flash technology and action script.

This product is truly customer oriented. We tried to make things as simple as possible. All script settings are stored in external text files, so you can reconfigure the template within a couple of minutes.

The dynamic nature of Flip Book templates makes the website load faster. Now you do not have to wait for 10 minutes till the website loads. In fact it happens in seconds and the majority of the visitors do not even notice the loader at all.

Getting started.

To insert your own content you will need 2 variants of each page:

1. Big JPG image 850х1088(actual pages in 100% size)

2. Small JPG image 85х109(page thumbnails)

Every big image must be converted in SWF format(Flash 8), this is required for graphics dithering and http links embedding.

After you have prepared all pages you should edit the XML file and define path top the appropriate images. It is very important to keep existing naming system.

To edit the “content menu” please open mag.fla file using adobe flash 8, find “subContent symbol” in flash library, open the 1st frame of layer3 and go to line 18 in action script panel. This will allow you to create your own menu.

Navigation Items.

ZOOM Button- set page scale to 100%.

FULLSCREEN Button - switches fullscreen mod on.

PAGES Button - displays page preview thumbnails.

CONTENTS Button - Shows flip book content links.

SAVE Button - download PDF/DOC version of the flip book.

PRINT Button - prints the current page.

FAVORITES Button - adds website to favorites.

SEND Button - sends the website URL by email.

LINKS Button - the list of link partners.

NOTES Button - adds a note to the page.

SOUNDS Button - switches ON/OF the sound track.

HELP Button - brief navigation description

So, DATE, and we are proud to announce the end of the contest and very pleased to have received so much attention to our event. Of course, everyone is interested in who is the winner. Here it is, the wordpress theme designed by Robert Schultheiss:

Except for it, we have received FIVE designs more. Though they are not winning, but nevertheless, we found them really appealing. Designed by Harmen Stoppels, it was the first theme which we received: Connor Leigh-Smith from Sharkofmirkwood Narendra S.V. from TechTreak GoBlogging.net Fikri Wirawan

As the received themes are not our property, these authors can use them for any puproses they want, but without any graphics associated with Flashmint. And if you want And now, let me come up to the part which is not less interesting - the contest for bloggers.

According to our statistics, the first largest number of visitors to us was brought by http://work-at-home-wealth.com/, the second largest number - by http://www.dulcenegosyante.com/ and the third - by http://www.contestwinner.blogspot.com/. All the winners, please send your PayPal details to flashmint.contest-at-gmail dot com. The payment will be issued within 24 hours.

Others who took part in the contest, don’t worry as we keep our words. Please, find a backlink to your websites HERE. If we have forgotten to mention you, please, don’t be angry with us. A lot of bloggers have taken part in the contest and we did our best to reward all of them. Just write to the following address - flashmint.contest-at-gmail dot com and we’ll add you to the list. Please note that we offered PR4 link back but in result you will get PR5 backlink

Thanks all. Waiting for the new contest