Espied: A Free WordPress Portfolio Theme for Designers and Photographers

If you’re on the hunt for a new design to showcase your work, WordPress.com’s beautiful Espied theme is now available for use on self-hosted sites. This striking minimalist portfolio theme was created with designers, photographers, and artists in mind.

Espied utilizes WordPress.com’s portfolio feature, which was recently added to Jetpack. With this custom content type enabled, users can easily manage and showcase projects with the [portfolio] shortcode.

Customization options for Espied include support for a 1600 × 320px header image, the ability to set the header text color, and a unique option for setting the thumbnail aspect ratio. Featured image ratio options include landscape (4:3), portrait (3:4), and square (1:1). This setting carries over to archive pages, the portfolio page template, and portfolio shortcodes.

The theme includes a sidebar that slides out to display navigation and widgets. It is hidden until clicked in order to keep the focus on showcasing your work.

Espied also features a beautiful way to display your social links via a custom menu. Add your social URLs as menu items and the theme will automatically display the right icon, if it’s available. It currently includes 22 different icons for various social profiles.

Espied showcases images at full width on larger displays so it’s important to use images that are at least 1272px. Although the theme does include beautiful, readable typography for blogging, the design is probably best-suited for sites that are primarily portfolios or other visual showcases. Check out a live demo on WordPress.com to see the theme in action.

With the release of Espied, the folks at Automattic are approaching 50 free themes listed on WordPress.org. This portfolio theme is a home run and responds nicely to any screen size. If you want an easy way to showcase your work without having to configure a ton of options, Espied is an excellent choice. Download it from the WordPress.org or install it directly via your admin themes panel.