The Italic Smile theme was publicly submitted for the WordCamp New York City 2009 Plugin/Theme Competition… and won!
WordCamp NYC Plugin/Theme Competition
The second version of the Italic Smile theme came in the form of a travel site for a couple moving to France. BManAndHtown.com is a clean website with gallery capabilities along with contact forms and a ShoutBox to allow friends and family to leave quick messages. This site shows the most recent post in full, along with the excerpts from the next three posts. Recent posts are also shown in the sidebar for easy access.
These gallery images also have captions which show up beneath the thumbnail:
Below is an example gallery from PuerTour.com. This helps to show how simple it is to navigate through an image gallery by either clicking on the images or using the ← → arrow keys from your keyboard. Also notice how each image is sized to the browser screen size even if the native image size is much larger.
You can have text below the gallery as well. Like this.
The first version of the Italic Smile 
theme was built to showcase a Puer Tea Tour through Southern China. This trip took place over two weeks and we needed a good way for viewers to easily navigate through each day. A post was created for each day along with a gallery of photos.
Below you can see a 4-column native WordPress gallery with a few screen shots of PuerTour.com:
The name Italic Smile came from a Google Talk conversation between Tim Bowen and Brian Gunzenhauser in late August, 2005.
In August, 2005, Tim and Brian were trying out the then new Google Talk program while working remotely. In experimenting with the ways to make italic text with underscores, Brian commented on the idea of an italic smile; emphasizing an emoticon smile with an underscore (e.g. _:)_). Tim mentioned that he liked the name “italic smile,” and both agreed that it would be a good domain name.
Four years later this WordPress theme was named Italic Smile!