10 Best Minimal WordPress Themes [For Free]
30/03/2011 | 12 Comments
It’s a well known fact that attractive design with a lot of color, textures, and design elements may attract your readers more towards the design than your brilliantly written content. A clean and minimal design gets out of the way and lets the content do the talking, because a minimal style is more appropriate for the content and it’s audience.
I love minimalism in web design. Minimalism as a term is used to describe a design style that has been reduced to its bare elements, were only the content and navigation are evident and with limited graphics. There is something pure about stripping out all of the unnecessary elements from a design. Its a perfect balance of design skills and good quality content.
Today I attempt to roundup the minimalist style WordPress themes, actually there are lot of choices from the database, and it is impossible to have the accurate list. As the result, the list below only focus on the professionalism and minimalism.
Minimal and Free WordPress Themes
Upstart Blogger Modicus WordPress Theme
Modicus now comes in two flavors: the original 3-column version and a new 2-column version. The new 2-column version adds an Options tab to your WordPress admin, where you can set column arrangement and alignment, etc. Modicus was designed by Robert Ellis.
Modern Clix WordPress Theme
Modern Clix is a minimal blog theme inspired in the Swiss Style of Design: It features Arial/Helvetica, grids, a generous use of whitespace for better readability and a strong focus in typography. This lovely WordPress Theme is designed by Rodrigo Galindez. The name Modern Clix is inspired in Charly García’s album “Clics Modernos”.
Manifest WordPress Theme
The goal of the designer (Jim Barraud) with Manifest was to create a clean and streamlined theme that focused on the content and not the distractions. It utilizes a single column, 500 pixel wide layout. No sidebars. No widgets.
If a user attempts to view this site in IE6, they’ll be presented with an unstyled (but perfectly functional) site. Along with a friendly message suggesting they upgrade their browser.
Neutra WordPress Theme
Neutra is a simple and elegant theme for WordPress. Grid-based with focus on simplicity and typography. It has a grid like structure with a sidebar at the right hand side of the page. It also has a nice multi level drop down navigation menu. Designed by Artmov.
Clean Home WordPress Theme
This WordPress theme is one with a minimal, clean looking design and has full CSS widgetization. Designed by Bryan Helmig of MidMo Web Design. This Theme has 2 columns with a right sidebar and with a fixed width.
Aqualine WordPress Theme
Aqualine is a unique and minimalist WordPress theme, that you can easily make customization to suit your needs. It is packed with an extensive options page – easily customise your theme without touching any code: Pick your own colour accent, choose a thumbnail with excerpts layout, or display your full posts, amongst many other built in options.
Aqualine is a Free Minimalist WordPress Theme designed by Brendon Grobler and eFrog Themes for Onextrapixel and its readers.
Blogum WordPress Theme
Blogum is a simple, grid based blog WordPress theme, designed in a modern & minimalist style. The theme has a heavy focus on your content and very clean feel. Theme supports all WordPress 3.0 features and gives you extra flexibility.
Typominima WordPress Theme
Typominima, a free typography based, gorgeous, minimal WordPress theme fit for the writer inside you. If you’re looking for a free theme to help you put the content in spotlight, without worrying about it being suffocated by advertising space and unnecessary design blign, than Typominima is the perfect free WordPress theme for you.
Miniml Press WordPress Theme
Minimal Press is a very minimal, three column WordPress theme, “founded on starkers” and “built on the golden grid,” according to siiimple, its author. Minimal Press is one of the most impressive, and impeccable, free WordPress themes out there, an ideal starter for almost any kind of site requiring a similar layout.
The Simple Type WordPress Theme
The Simple Type WordPress theme was created with typography and minimalism in mind. It was created by Jon Phillips from SpyreStudios for 1st WebDesigner.
Make sure to check the download link, this is also the link to the tutorial for this WordPress Theme on 1st WebDesigner.
Conclusion
High quality free WordPress Themes have become harder and harder to find in the past year, with the invasion of premium themes, more and more designers and developers are selling themes (and rightly so, because they make amazing themes).
Enjoy minimalism: great typography, white color, grid, white spaces and remember – very often simply good typography and great use of white space is a lot better than theme overloaded with effects, colors, images and too much CSS styling! Just wanted to say ..
nice work indeed. Subscribing to your feeds Hello,guys,your blog is really great! I like it.
Hi Ethel,
Thanks for your comment, these kind of things just can make my day! Enjoy yours ..
Cheers & Ciao ..
love the themes, please post more of these
Hi LtT,
thanks for your comment, and yeah, .. maybe I will post more collections of nice WP Themes, who knows? Wanna do a collection of Tumblr Themes first, .. hopefully with my template in it too ;-P
Have a great weekend, Cheers & Ciao ..
Nice! I really appreciate minimal and simple themes. Thanks for sharing that new and original templates!
Hi GTA 5,
Thanks, these are really my favorites too! I love minimalism, somehow it’s so powerful because it lets the content come out, and personally I think content is the most important factor why people visit a website in the first place! Thanks for your comment, see you next time!
Cheers & Ciao ..!
Hi MG,
Haha, .. yep, you’re right! Not that minimalism means automatically that no colors are allowed, because some of these themes also have a black version of it, as a built-in option (otherwise it’s easy to change this in the CSS-file).
I published ‘white’ themes because these themes are great to hack and to make your own (totally customized) theme. Personally I love it to have a ‘clear and clean’ start when tweaking .., so ‘white’ is a good choice ;-P
Thanks for your comment! Cheers & Ciao ..
Hi Luigi,
Thanks for bookmarking and I think you’ll love 15 Best & Free WordPress Portfolio Themes? Thanks for visiting the gonzoblog.nl, cheers & ciao ..