Hamilton: A Free WordPress Portfolio Theme for Photographers, Illustrators, and Designers

Hamilton is a new portfolio theme released by Swedish designer and developer Anders Norén during his summer vacation. It was created for photographers, illustrators, designers, and image-heavy blogs. The theme displays portfolio items in a minimal, masonry-style grid with an optional tagline on the front page.

“Hamilton has a pretty simple design at its core, so when it was more or less finished, I decided to add a couple of fun theme options to make it more customizable,” Norén said. “The main one is the Dark Mode. With a click of the mouse in the WordPress Customizer, you can change Hamilton from dark text on a white background to white text on a dark background.”

The Customizer also includes a few other helpful options for portfolio sites:

Set a custom background image or color

Replace the navigation toggle in the header with the Primary Menu on desktop

Change two-column default post grid display to three columns on desktop

Display titles in the post previews

Add a title to front page when it’s set to display latest posts

The theme is beautifully responsive to various devices and screen sizes. Norén’s typography choices are clean and readable on mobile.

Hamilton includes styles for the default WordPress image gallery with more interesting options available to create complex galleries stacked with different numbers of columns. It also supports Jetpack’s Infinite Scroll module and has styles for blockquotes, pullquotes, and left/right/center aligned media.

One of the most unique features of the theme is the Resume template. It gives users the option to add a simple resume to their portfolios, without having to add a plugin. The template uses basic HTML for formatting with h1 header tags, horizontal rules, and unordered lists. The template could use a bit more documentation, since not all users are familiar with HTML, but it’s a useful addition for simple portfolio sites.

Check out a live demo along with the style guide to see the theme in action.

Hamilton is Anders Norén’s 15th theme approved for the WordPress Theme Directory. When he submitted it to the Theme Review Team, he anticipated that it would take a month or two for it to get through the review process. His previously submitted theme, Davis, took approximately nine months to make it through the queue. He was surprised to find that Hamilton went through the process in under a month. After less than a week on WordPress.org, the theme has already been downloaded more than 200 times.