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…
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…
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…
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…
The life of a frontend developer has changed a great deal over the past few years, with the introduction of new technologies for authoring CSS and automating tasks. We’re starting to see that trickle down into every new WordPress starter theme. These days you’ve got to npm install allthiscrazystuff just to get started on a…
Some Like it Neat is a new starter theme for WordPress, based on the popular ultra-minimal Underscores theme. It also incorporates Bourbon, a lightweight mixin library for Sass. On top of that it adds Neat, which applies a semantic grid framework for Sass and Bourbon, enabling you to build any responsive layout that you can…
A few months ago, the folks at GavickPro abandoned their GavernWP Framework in favor of using the WordPress customizer for theme options. The shop’s customers found the original framework to be too cumbersome and confusing, so the GavickPro team decided to move away from frameworks altogether. With the customizer in place as the baseline for…
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…
A steady stream of minimalist themes for writers has been flowing into the official WordPress Themes Directory this year. As people grow disenchanted with interaction on social networks, the personal blog is on course for a renaissance. The beauty of WordPress is that anyone with something to say can be a writer. Crawford joins their…
When we last interviewed Anders Norén, he was the new kid on the block with a handful of successful WordPress themes. Norén, a communications student from Umeå, Sweden, had just started tossing around the idea of pursuing WordPress theme development as a serious hobby. In the span of about one year, he has released eight…
The folks at ThematoSoup are in the habit of naming their theme releases for delicious soup dishes. The team, comprised of WordPress plugin and theme developers Slobodan Manic and Dragan Nikolic, is dedicated to creating minimalist-inspired WordPress products. “We eat, sleep and breathe WordPress and digital clutter gives us nightmares,” the duo expressed on their…
The folks behind Graph Paper Press launched a new custom WordPress theme builder this week. Theme.Works was created to be a new brand, featuring a theme building platform that allows users to build a WordPress theme in under 60 seconds. “We wanted something crazy easy for users to understand and use,” founder Thad Allender said.…
A month ago, WordPress.com released a new business theme that features support for its new site logo feature. The Edin theme was an instant hit with its users and is now available for use on self-hosted WordPress sites. The theme was designed by Thomas Guillot to create a strong brand and online presence for any…