Clear Tranquil is one of the cleanest, most elegant blogging themes to hit WordPress.org in recent days. The theme was created by Woo Themes designer James Koster as a child theme for his responsive Highwind parent theme.
Clear Tranquil lives up to its name, inspiring a light, peaceful reading experience that is clutter-free. The design puts your content in focus.
Koster gives meticulous attention to typography and highlights the first character of each post with elegant block letter styles. The theme includes a sticky, understated top navigation menu (optional), and zero widget areas. That’s right, Clear Tranquil is a completely widget-free zone.
The theme includes a handful of customization options built into WordPress’ native customizer. You can personalize it with a custom header, background, and your own color selections for text, links, and backgrounds.
Clear Tranquil includes no additional features, because everything has been intentionally stripped back to keep things simple. Koster hasn’t set up a live demo of the theme. Ordinarily, the WordPress.org demo gives an unrealistic representation of what a theme will look like. However, in this case, it’s fairly accurate.
One of the things that I love about the WordPress theme installation process is that it will automatically install the parent theme for a child theme, if you don’t already have it installed. In this scenario, if you install Clear Tranquil without Highwind already in place, it will be automatically downloaded for you.
If your blog has gotten bloated with widgets and is in need of a minimalist makeover, Clear Tranquil might be just the ticket. Download it for free from the WordPress Themes Directory.
It’s really good to see so many theme developers creating clean minimal themes. Another great minimal theme released this month is “Casper” (http://wordpress.org/themes/casper). Hopefully my minimalist blog theme “Crawford” will also make its way into the WordPress repository this month.