Themes
From HTML 5 up
HTML 5 up has a great collection of free themes, all licenced with Creative Commons licsenses and free to download and use. These are in plain HTML and CSS formats so they’re not designed for any specific framework. Instead you can adjust them to fit whatever you’re using or none at all.
The typography is has it’s own distinct light style. They frequently use a light grey, #636363, or reduce the opacity by a third so that the type does not jump out too much. This can mean the type doesn’t pass the official contrast tests but the effect is nonetheless pleasing. A light font weight (300) is also used. The fonts they often use are:
- source sans pro at 300 and 400 weights
- arial at 400/700
- raleway at 800 or 900 for heading with increased letter spacing
- roboto at 100 / 300 (headings)
Here is a list of some of my favourites:
- editorial is a beautiful white theme with simple layout that’s well designed for blogging with a photos.
- stellar is in muted purple pastel shades. Good for a landing page or home page.
- Future Imperfect is a lovely, photo based, blogging theme.
- lens as the name suggests is perfect for a photo blog with full page images.
- dopetrope
- txt a nice landing page theme.
Themefisher
Although Themefisher is a primarily a ‘pay for’ service there are excellent free themes. Each theme comes with it’s own documentation making it easy to use.
This is a small selection but most are high quality so probably best to browse the Themefisher website directly
Other sites
- Themezy
- ColorLib has selection of free WP themes
- Templatemo all free templates and you can download all in swoop, if you want to.
- Geek Code Lab has mix of paid and free themes, plus logos.