WordPress theme designer Anders Norén is an unstoppable force, rolling out his ninth free theme to WordPress.org in just over a year. Fukasawa is a masonry theme designed to showcase the work of photographers, collectors, and visual artists.
The theme is named for Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, who is both well-known and highly decorated for his influential work in designing electronics and household appliances. Design is a way of life for Fukasawa, and his works originate out of an awareness of what is natural, an instinctual response to the surrounding environment.
“I wanted to do a really clean design built with a media-heavy grid in mind,” Norén said about his latest creation. Fukasawa delivers with its minimalist Pinterest-style layout.
The theme offers support for three post formats, including image, gallery, and video. Gallery posts include a built-in slideshow of images before the post content. Both galleries and videos play on the home page in addition to the single posts template.
Fukasawa adds support for one sidebar area and five custom widgets, including recent posts, categories, Flickr, Dribble, and a video widget. A few of these can be seen in the sidebar of the live demo.
In contrast to the masonry style homepage, Fukasawa includes a highly simplified archive template, which will populate the page with a list of posts, categories, tags, and contributors to the site.
The theme’s design is mostly set and your site will look very similar to the demo immediately upon installation. The customizer allows you to upload a custom logo and to change the theme’s accent color, which is visible in certain elements like blockquotes and links.
Fukasawa integrates with Jetpack for adding infinite scroll to load posts without reloading the page. It also includes built-in support for Jetpack Tiled Galleries, which you can preview on the live demo’s style guide page.
When composing in the visual editor, you’ll find that Fukasawa includes matching editor styles to help you visualize your content on the frontend. The theme is also responsive, retina-ready and translation-ready.
If your blog features highly visual posts, then Fukasawa is a solid option for putting the spotlight on your content in an elegant, mobile-friendly way. Download it for free from WordPress.org or install it via your admin theme browser.
Superb theme!