We really put lots of time into developing a simple minimalistic blog theme. We thought somehing like that is missing at TF. However reviewer thought that this was not enough:
I am afraid this item is pretty poor and quite far from prime ready. It would undoubtedly take a considerable amount of work to get it to a point where we would consider going further with a full review. So I am afraid I will have to hard reject it on this instance.We are only considering items that really stand-out and have been carefully crafted.
We believe in something completely opposite. This theme has been extremely carefully crafted. It is minimalistic, but clearly has lots of work put into it especially when we consider the code structure. Bit dissapointed as everyone else that receives one of these emails, but what we can do now…hard reject is the hard reject. We believe that we do have a great product and will pursue our theme business elsewhere.
Let me know what you think about our Enso Rei theme:
https://demo.ensothemes.com/
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Hi
With respect very intro level design and no premium design and features. Just a front page as like blog page and only some other pages showing different style blog page design. No other pages and no premium features exist in your theme.
Besides this in your exisitng design:
- spacing and alignment
- typography & visual hierarchy
- line height
issues exist. themforest quality standard and requirements improved much. for getting approve you have to provide unique aesthetics design with best UI and have to put premium design. Please study more on trending themes on this market especially released within the last 12 months in WordPress Blog category and see you will find the lack in your theme.
Please don’t upset just you need to spent times to know market standard.
Thanks
Likewise to @mgscoder comments with respect it is a long way off the standard.
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There are issues throughout with spacing, typography and hierarchy
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There’s nothing particularly unique or premium that makes it stand out
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You need way way more options and versatility to compete e.g. multiple home page layouts, multiple category page layouts, multiple post types (not jsut adjsuted hero section),
No hard feelings. Thank you for your replies.
Hello!
- Headings line-height can be increased. https://yadi.sk/i/TQJCrEhvdDCz5w Currently they are a bit hard to read.
- Vice-versa for text paragraph. https://yadi.sk/i/TLjnWv6wkXcpDg This is too big line-height.
- Lack of breathing space in certain areas https://yadi.sk/i/0fbicb03yWN9NA https://yadi.sk/i/j6g4hxgHMLjfLg https://yadi.sk/i/ACXfDNFjlNHt1g
- Lack of balance in composition (or it’s weird vertical alignment) https://yadi.sk/i/C143v8ugPnFyLQ
- Pay more attention to details. This looks like a standard bootstrap hover https://yadi.sk/i/SNgAE29-x10xrQ Your links are styled completely differently (better) inside the blog post.
- Bad colors combinations on hover https://yadi.sk/i/Vx0z5RSRZ5gAOg
- Your theme has b&w look and feel with some little accents but there is a sudden green color https://yadi.sk/i/ct9BKhdfIPpG6Q
With all due respect, your theme design really lacks some uniqueness and artistry. It looks more like a standard freebie theme rather than a premium product the buyers will be craving to purchase. Doing smart theme structure is always a good practice in development but it’s an under-the-hood of your product which many buyers won’t even dive into. Design is the #1 aspect you should pay attention to get your product approved (or at least soft rejected for further improvements).
Actually we followed latest UX standards so design is not the issue at all. The lack of additional pages is probably biggest downpoint. We are not going to design the theme that is artsy oriented as many themes today look nice, but when you change photos and art they lose the composition. Simplicity is the final goal so we do not plan to change nothing big when it comes to UX. We will however add new layouts, categories and landing pages.
I think your use of white space is very poor. You cannot get into this industry thinking of making money just like that. You have to spend a lot of time working on the required skills and you have to provide serious quality to the customer.Theme designing and developing required a lot of hard work and patience. I started in 2014 and got my first theme rejected in 2017 which took me about 8 months to develope, it was a soft rejection BTW. But i resubmitted thrice and failed. i was so dishearted that i didn’t touch my work for a whole year, i was a student back then. That one year break made me realize how pathetic my design was but still i got soft rejection thrice not hard. That one year break also made my mind process all the skills i worked on and made me think of a design in another way. As a web developer i believe designing is way more harder then developing, you need some serious time to develope the sense of design, it looks easy but execution is very hard. Now me and my team are working on a Multi purpose wordpress theme for about 1.5 years now in which 70% of our time is invested in good research to bring a new and fresh deign in the market. Theme development is a serious business my friend it requires huge amount of time and effort. And i am talking about a successful theme not just another theme in the market. I hope you learn something from my experiance and sorry for my poor english 
Here you see the difference by yourself, i just added some white space to elements. Match yours with this one https://imgur.com/txcW1uX .
You are not the only one I worked an entire year on a theme and got a hard reject.
I hired a designer and now I am giving this a second shot.
I don’t believe the reviewers want to reject you but they are right your theme need a lot of improvements.
My advice is to not give up I know how it feels give it a few days to clear your mind then get back on it.
Good luck.
Thanks everyone for the extensive suggestions. We still believe that design is perfect as it is. We will be adding new pages and components then it will all fall in place nicely. For now we can manage without TF lets see what will time present in the future.