Tom Fadial well know as thame to the TXP community started the Textplate theme contest last month. For the very first contest of it´s kind in TXP history, it was a great success. So here is a short interview with Tom. Some quick notes on Tom: he is a eighteen year old freshman at the University at Buffalo majoring in Biomedical Sciences.

Q. Hi Tom, since when are you in the design/webdev business?

Tom: My first experience with web publishing was a little over a year ago for a school project. Since then, I’ve been hooked and designed my first website a few months later.

Q. Do you work as a freelancer or are you employed with an webagency?

Tom: Both, actually. I am a Web Developer at the University at Buffalo’s Marketing and Creative Services and love it. I also do some freelance design on the side.

Q. Did you take part at a design contest yourself?

Tom: I really wanted to enter the Typo template competition but didn’t have enough time. After seeing what a tremendous success it was, I wanted to do the same for my favorite CMS.

Q. On the TXP forum there have been discussions concerning a template contest already last year. Eventually you took the chance and started Textplates.com and the contest. What was your personal motivation doing so?

Tom: As with most forum-born ideas, they reach a peak of activity before being buried under other stories or otherwise losing steam. After seeing that there had been no updates in a while, I figured I would take the initiative to finally get it started. Luckily, people were very receptive and helped me get going. ’s

My motivation for hosting the competition is very simple: I wanted to see some original Textpattern templates. Before the competition, almost all of the templates available were ports from other CMS and providing some incentive through a competition was the best way to spark some new work.

Q. You won a couple of impressive sponsors. How was the sponsors reaction on your request in the first place?

Tom: Most sponsors were as excited about the competition as I was so it only took a little bit of pestering to get them to cough up some wonderful prizes.

Q. How did you select the judges? What were the criterias?

Tom: I wanted well-known designers and coders who could judge submissions based on both their beauty and functionality.

Q. Looking at the submissions it seemed hard to judge. Do you yourselv have one or two favorites?

Tom: I am personally giving away a Mint license to James Muspratt for the template Wildscreen – though it was really hard to judge.

Q. Do you intend to start a second contest or even make it an annual happening?

Tom: The competition has already been an amazing success with almost 10,000 downloads already. Also, I’ve learned a great deal about how to lead an effective competition so I am planning on making this an annual competition.

Thanks Tom for the interview :)