Modernist: Free WordPress Theme with Focus on Typography

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Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬

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Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: a beautiful Modernist WordPress theme, designed by Rodrigo Galindez and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The theme is based on the design ideas of Jan Tschichold, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Dieter Rams, and other modernists. Beautifully built yet transparent, it was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content: text, images and video.

The theme supports widgets, is SEO optimized, has clean and documented code. It is loading very quickly, and has various WordPress 3.0 features. Works in IE 6+ and all versions of Safari/Firefox/Opera. Includes CSS3 enhancements. As usual, the theme is absolutely free to use in private and commerical projects.

Download the theme for free! #

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

Screenshot

Features #

The installation of the theme is very simple. No plugins required, no extra frameworks required. Just download the theme, upload it to your server and activate it to make it work.

  • WordPress 3.0.1 tested. It works with the latest version of WordPress, and also with previous versions.
  • Embraces Social Media. Modernist has links to share each post to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious Digg, and Reddit. No plugins needed, it just works out of the box.
  • Is SEO optimized. Modernist has been carefully handcrafted in order to produce a clean HTML/CSS template. No unnecessary lines, just pure, semantical, bulletproof code that Google loves.
  • Supports widgets. Modernist has a widgetized sidebar, and WordPress’ default widgets are styled. You can also drop your favorite widgets or plugins without needing to touch a single line of code.
  • Has support for threaded comments, navigation for comments, table styles, header styles and definition lists styles.
  • Is flexible and extensible. Change the color scheme to suit your own taste. All the code is well commented. Personalize the theme by adding your own header or your own images in the sidebar. Use font embedding services such as Typekit to serve different fonts and make the typography look unique!

Feature
Homepage (large preview)

Feature
Comments (large preview)

Feature
Comment Form (large preview)

Feature
Post (large preview)

Feature
Search Results (large preview)

Feature
Main Nav

Feature
Section

Thank you, Rodrigo Galindez. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.

You may be interested in the following related releases:

— Comments 70

Raiman Au
Raiman Au wrote #

Wow, I really love how you can have a theme that looks beautiful just because of the typography. Makes you come back and think about the basics after focusing on image after image on a theme's design. An absolutely beautiful work. The "carefully handcrafted by Rodrigo Galindez" must be an understatement! I wonder how much time it took to choose the fonts and set all the spacing! Thanks for providing this! It's an inspiration!

Ben
Ben wrote #

Really nice theme, I cant understand how people can give these away for free though, they must be putting some serious work into them

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