What is considered unique?
 

With so many websites out there, it's hard to come up with a unique design for a template. What are some things you can do to create a unique design?

When I've tried to stretch my creativity, I came up with chain borders and abnormal shapes for tables.

I think it is all in to colors that you can choses and how you mix them up because you can have a thousand of the smae templates but with different colors they are different templates to me.

I suggest combining styles from different templates you see that you think will work good together. Try that, and you could come up with some good results.

Yes, using other peoples work for inspiration has worked for me before. I've done so when creating graphic pieces, but never when creating a template.

For my web designs, I just follow someone's style that I like a lot. For example, http://christian-hosting.biz was made by following http://fortunecity.com's design and http://registerfly.com's design. BTW, I don't own Christian-Hosting.biz anymore. I've sold it ;)