When Dumitru Brinzan launched AcademiaThemes in early 2014, he did so with the goal of providing high quality themes for the education sector. With one year under his belt, I reached out to Brinzan to find out how the business is doing. The first year was rough, thanks in large part to algorithm changes implemented…
Looking back on the theme landscape of 2014, a clear design trend emerged that highlights WordPress’ roots as a blogging platform. Minimalist, content-centric themes took center stage in the official WordPress Themes Directory, outpacing their more visually-bloated commercial counterparts. This past year saw a major renaissance in themes for the personal blogger, particularly designs that…
The Google web fonts library has over 650 fonts and without a keen eye for design, it can be difficult to find complimentary fonts. After we highlighted how you can customize Twenty Fifteen with over 650 free fonts, some readers questioned whether customizing fonts should be left up to designers. Typography Project Beautifully Illustrates Complimentary…
The new WordPress default theme, Twenty Fifteen, looks great and provides a lot of flexibility, but one thing it lacks is the option to customize fonts. A free plugin called Typecase, by UpThemes, solves this problem by giving users easy access to over 650 different fonts. Typecase uses the Google webfonts library, which has slowly…
Nulis is one of the most unique designs to land in the WordPress Themes Directory this year. At first glance, you might think the theme is rather plain. The screenshot on the theme’s description page doesn’t indicate anything interesting going on under the hood, but something about it intrigued me enough to put it up…
Despite a global decrease in public funding for space programs, humans are still reaching for the last frontier through film, music, and even design. Automattic’s latest free theme release on WordPress.org is a bold new take on the space motif. Intergalactic features strong typography with post titles overlaying full-width featured images. The one-column layout is…
Throughout the first half of this month, the WordPress Accessibility team has been working together with the Theme Review Team to discuss the possibility of requiring the accessibility-ready tag for themes hosted on WordPress.org. The team will need to create an official proposal to submit to the Theme Review Team in order to make this…
Minnow is a beautiful, ultra-minimalist blogging theme from Automattic that just landed in the WordPress.org directory this week, bringing the company’s total free theme contributions to 54. It was designed by Mel Choyce, co-author of the popular Flounder theme. Minnow features a single-column blog homepage, with a prominent social links menu at the top. The…
Major changes are coming to the Roots starter theme for WordPress. Roots has appealed mainly to developers, because it incorporates modern build tools into its workflow. The theme was first released in 2011 and now counts more than 70 contributors to the project. Roots currently utilizes HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, Grunt, and Bower in the starter…
WordPress 4.1 hasn’t yet been officially released, but child themes for the new Twenty Fifteen default theme are already popping up. The minimalist, blog-focused theme has so far been well received and users are already eagerly testing it out. WordPress developer Chris McCoy has created a Twenty Fifteen child theme with a unique twist. At…
ModernThemes is a new WordPress theme site dedicated to giving away free themes. The themes were designed and developed by Robbie Grabowski and Mike Driscoll, the folks behind a group of agencies that specialize in custom WordPress work. The duo created the site in order to make modern themes and give back to the web…
In an effort to inspire WordPress theme designers and add a variety of new themes to the directory, the WordPress Theme Review Team is hosting a Design Challenge Weekend, December 13-14th. The challenge is meant to do the following: Raise the design standard of the WordPress.org theme directory. Match developers to designers. Encourage designers to…
WooCommerce recently passed five million downloads, shortly before the Woo team kicked off the first WooConf earlier this month. The conference, devoted solely to WooCommerce, sold out with 300 attendees. The plugin had 294 contributors on its most recent 2.2 release and is currently being used on 18% of all e-commerce sites on the web.…
This year’s State of the Word at WordCamp San Francisco emphasized WordPress going global through improvements to internationalization. This year also marks the first time non-English downloads of WordPress have surpassed its English counterpart. Catering to Customer’s Needs With WordPress raising the bar, it won’t be long until users and customers expect themes and plugins…
Masonry is a new free WordPress theme with an elegant 1-column design. You’d be hard-pressed to find a theme that is easier to set up. It offers just a handful of options built into the native customizer, including the ability to customize the header colors and header background image. The theme is mobile-friendly, with a…