Cool, beautiful Wordpress themes
Gotham Nights boasts a multi-coloured header/background image and a two-column layout with lovely typography and oodles of white space.
It has a nice tabbed section in the right-hand sidebar allowing site authors to organise and display lots of content.
It would also be very simple to change the background to create a more minimalist but still elegant and effective look.
Crystal 1.0 is a very usable, dark, two-column Wordpress theme built off the back of the popular Hemingway style.
It’s widget-ready and features a neat horizontal navigation at the top, with a ‘crystal’ blue background. Changing the background on that nav bar (and preferably the background and link colours to match) would be a simple way to customise the theme to create your own unique style.
Hunsecker is a Wordpress theme with light text on a dark background; it has lovely typography, a nice sense of space and a unique three-column layout.
The theme has a nice, simple header with navigation bar. This stays in place when you scroll down. I’m not a big fan of the effect but it’s nicely implemented in this case.
The left-hand column contains metadata about each post, the central column has the main content and the right-hand column contains whatever you want really.
Colourise is a gorgeous, two-column Wordpress theme with an ultra large header image, a dark backdrop and a fat footer.
The colours are well chosen, the navigation bar is beautifully styled and the typography is first class.
With a custom header image, Colourise could make a perfect personal or professional blog.
Dark, creative and individual, with a distinctive splash of colour, Stilbruch is an eye-catching one-column Wordpress theme.
The theme site is in German, but don’t let that put you off checking out this funky theme with ‘falling pixels’.
Balance White and Balance Black are contemporary, two-column Wordpress themes offering a choice of dark or light background colours.
Anyone using this theme will need to replace the header image so that it reflects their blog title, rather than just saying “Balance White” or “Balance Black”. This is easy to do by simply creating an image of the right size and replacing the current header image.
Overall, the theme has an interesting layout, with navigation in the left sidebar and a wide content area with the body text indented further than the headlines.
The templates have a Web 2.0 feel about them, without being too tied to that trend.
MNML is a simple two-column theme for Wordress with a hint of the tumblelog about it.
The theme has some neat features, including a fast posting box that appears at the top of the home page if you’re logged in to the site. Asides are also built-in and well styled.
The design has a dark background and light text, with a sidebar on the right. One aspect I don’t like is the rollover that happens sidebar-wide when mousing over anything in that area, though that “feature” should be relatively simple to remove from the CSS.
Instead of a header, there’s a ‘frame’ of sorts with navigation and the blog title which appears at the bottom of the screen.
The Video theme from Quommunications is an extremely professional Wordpress theme perfect for videobloggers. Videos are featured front and centre, with details about the particular video that’s being played appearing below.
It’s dark grey and black, with a clean, ultra-modern appearance.
On the right-hand side is a list of videos ready for browsing - and sorted by category. The code is clean and well-commented, and widgets are built in. The theme also has an AJAX comment system and gravatar support out of the box.
The Video theme costs $US95 for a single-site licence, $US175 for a five-site licence and $US295 for unlimited licences.
Plane Jane is a simple two-column theme with light text on a dark background, drawing a little inspiration from well-known Mac website Daring Fireball.
The content runs in the main left-hand column, while there’s a top navigation bar and more room to play with in the right-hand sidebar.
The content and navigation is sharp and the typography is crystal clear.
Elixir from whalesalad is a dark, two-column Wordpress theme with a splash of bright colour (and I do mean bright) in the header area.
It comes in a choice of five colours: classic pink; cool blue; lime green; smooth purple; or bright orange.
The theme has a Web 2.0 feel without going over the top. It has clear typography and a well set-out navigation area in the left-hand column.
Woo Themes: Stylish blog, news and business themes. W00t!
