I’ve always been a keen fan of minimalist design, and so it seems only right that my first round-up of WordPress themes should be of some awesome minimalist WordPress themes.
Evoke
Evoke is a minimalist, highly customizable WordPress portfolio theme. The work is done for you to easily create a portfolio to showcase your work, as well as starting a blog. It comes with shortcodes and flexible widget areas that allow you to create all sorts of different layouts.
Evolution
Evolution is our first fully responsive design. What makes the theme so special is its ability to adapt to various screen sizes. Evolution come with 4 distinct layouts, each meant to improve your user’s experience when browsing on mobile phones and tablets.
Origin
A simple responsive theme for your personal, elegant-looking blog. Origin is a parent theme, built on the Hybrid Core framework. Which means it can be used as is, or as a platform for heavy customization via child themes.
Core
Core is the Minimalist Photography, Portfolio, Personal website Template built with latest WordPress features. Custom Post Type and Image Uploader etc.
Widely
Widely WordPress Theme is minimalistic theme perfect for for businesses, creatives, and individuals who want to quickly publish their portfolio and anyone else who’s serious about having a simple, well designed website with a full powered content manager.
The Bootstrap
A WordPress Theme based on Bootstrap, from Twitter. It features a 100% responsive layout, a superb gallery and image handling with a custom image meta widget and carousel for gallery post-formats, a clean and simple design and a lot more! The Bootstrap runs on HTML5 and CSS3, a 12-column grid and comes with custom jQuery plugins.
Oxygen
A premium-quality, responsive magazine theme for WordPress. Oxygen is a highly extensible parent theme, built on the industry-recognized Hybrid Core framework – a great base for creating your own child themes.
Notebook
Notebook is a fun multimedia theme that takes advantage of WordPress post formats and advanced CSS3 animations. The result is a unique and highly engaging design that is sure that impress your visitors. Notebook makes it easy to share a variety of content, including audio, video, photographs and standard blog posts.
Proyecto
Proyecto is a free WordPress theme that I created for those who want to setup a business and/or portfolio website. The theme includes a custom homepage with an image slider, highlights and latest portfolio items. All you need to do is add your content and everything is setup automatically.
Classica
Classica is a beautifully minimalistic portfolio theme, free from gimmick and trend, making your talent the focal point of your portfolio – the way it should be. Present your work in a professional manner with a timeless design.
Studio8
An elegant and minimalist WordPress theme for a design studio or photo studio. The theme has a fullscreen background gallery for featured work, twitter ticker, jquery paginated portfolio layout and blog, awsome hover effect, and an ajax contact form. The template offers a quick and easy setup. And its timthumb free.
Photum
Photum is a theme to use with WordPress that will turn your site into a clean portfolio that you can use to show off your photos. We have designed it to be neutral and clean so your work can stand out – there’s nothing worse than a portfolio site that detracts from your work.
Centita
Centita is WordPress Theme with minimalist and elegant look that suitable for your professional corporate website, easy to customize and rich of features.
Dreamy Clean
Dreamy Clean and Minimalist WordPress Portfolio Theme comes with extensive and fast support, 12 color skins and unlimited skin variations, 10 custom page templates, 8 different sliders, 30+ web fonts support, unique 6 homepage presentation variations, unique 4 colum animated presentation menu, portfolio and testimonial custom post type supported, automatic image resize, ajax powered contact form, easy and powerful admin settings panel and much more.
Gridly
A free minimal & responsive portfolio theme ideal for graphic designers or photographers.
MiniBuzz
MiniBuzz is a simple, clean and minimalist business wordpress theme suitable for business, portfolio, company and corporate. This theme can also be used for personal or blog site.
eList
eList is a verstile Directory WordPress Theme. Using eList, you can create an online directory of any type, and allow your visitors to submit new listings from the front end. The theme also comes with eCommerce integration, allowing you to charge your visitors for new or featured listings.
Reverie
Reverie Framework is an extremely versatile HTML5 WordPress framework based on ZURB’s Foundation, a powerful tool for building prototypes on any kind of devices. Reverie follows HTML5 Boilerplate standard and is hNews microformat ready. It is optimized for Search Engine while at the same time improve readability.
Sigma
Sigma is a Resposive and Minimalist Portfolio WordPress Theme built with HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and Grid for Creative Agency, Freelancer, Blogger and Business.
Architekt
Architekt Free WordPress Theme is clean simple and unique. Design to showcase your architectural portfolio This theme was inspired by the works of Fantastic Norway
Kin
KIN is a minimalist magazine style photography template (WordPress version). With 2 style variations
SimplePress
SimplePress is a slick new page-based theme great for anyone looking to give their website a clean and professional look. My goal with this design was to make something similar to our other business-oriented themes, but with a simpler and crisper aesthetic. The theme features a un-bloated bloated homepage with a beautiful javascript slider and clear hierarchy, as well as fully functional Blog and Gallery sections.
Rustik
Rustik is a beautiful minimalist WordPress+WooCommerce theme that makes your products the center of attention. You can create your own logo on the fly in the theme options with a selection of 400+ fonts, and any font size, font style and font color.The theme comes with two readymade color schemes and you can adjust many color options from the theme admin to give it your own style.
Grid Portfolio
Grid Portfolio Theme is clean theme with grid like layout, this WordPress theme is perfect to showcase any portfolio. Grid Portfolio has nice and unique structure to show any artwork.
Modest
Modest is a truly elegant and simple design that doesn’t sacrifice character or style. With this theme I really wanted to strip down all extraneous detail and give people some lightweight and pure. It was hard to resist my natural instict to add additional design elements, but I think this exercise in restraint has yielded a theme that will serve many people well.
Vulcan
Vulcan template is designed Modern and minimalist template, suit any kind of website. Vulcan available in five color option, it comes with three variations slider. With New Features of WordPress 3.0 Vulcan has been coded to improve capability of the WordPresss 3.0 features.
Swiss
Swiss WordPress Theme was inspire by the minimal and modern style of the Swiss designers.
July 13, 2012 at 7:13 pm
These are beautiful minimalist sites, Dave. I do notice that the quality of the photos really drives the overall impact, but the theme must accommodate. The Rustik left me with an intense feeling, like the open road on the plains.
July 14, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Well, yes, and I think that any good theme should do that. It shouldn’t be overbearing, and for portfolio sites, should allow the photos/artwork be the center of attention.
July 14, 2012 at 6:50 am
I see a lot of those in the list are from Elegant Themes, you must really like their designs ;) Anyway great list, some of the free themes look great, and the Reverie frameworks looks like it could be a Thesis alternative.
July 14, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Elegant Themes is a really good theme store and incredibly affordable, so yeah, I’m a big fan. And anything that replaces Thesis is a good thing in my book. I hate that framework with a passion!
July 18, 2012 at 6:51 pm
Just loving these minimalist design from WordPress. When I go to a website that has flashing images, banners, jumbled hard to read info, lot of colours and it looks a little crazy, I head straight out again. After all, the idea is to able to read, enjoy and absorb the content, not be bombarded by visual madness. Thanks.
August 21, 2012 at 12:47 pm
I thought your title say 27 FREE themes. I counted a little more than 10.
August 21, 2012 at 2:29 pm
It says free and premium. There’s a mix of both.
August 23, 2012 at 2:17 pm
Wow Dave you have come along way I was checking out the themes scrolled
to the bottom and said hey I remember that guy
Glad you been doing well
Nice work
August 24, 2012 at 8:40 am
Thanks John. Much appreciated. Yeah, it’s been a while, Hope you’re doing well too
September 25, 2012 at 10:52 pm
I am using the Oxygen theme. The layout looks really good. Docs can be improved or you can google for it.
I don’t think I will use it in the long run, because the “recent articles” and “More articles” in the picture slider template needs to be populated manually.