If you have been following Smashing Magazine for a while you know that we love high-quality freebies. Over the last years we’ve featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free — among other things we presented high-quality free fonts, free Wordpress themes, free wallpapers and, of course, free icons. You can find many of them in our section Freebies.
Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.
Today we are glad to release Infinity — a free professional Wordpress-theme. The theme has 3 fixed columns, thumbnails integration, Flickr, Delicious and Twitter integration as well as an attractive visual design. The theme was designed by Zhang Yichi, the creative mind behind Vikiworks Studio from Shanghai, China especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
Download the theme for free!
You can use the theme for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both designer’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission — please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish, but if you are planning to release your modification, please ask our permission first.
- Preview (0.56 Mb)
- Download the theme (.zip-package, 2 Mb)
- Download PSD-sources (.zip-package, 7 Mb)
Features of the theme and Development Kit
- 3 fixed columns design
- Thumbnail covers style
- Flickr, Twitter and delicious integration
- not widget-ready (see the development-kit below)
Currently Yichi is working on an extended version of the theme presented above which will have a style switcher, integration with social networks and a number of JavaScript-based animations. However, at the moment it is quite buggy and he needs your help to get the theme done.
The theme (which is called Mashup) works eventually, but has some strange bugs — for instance, sometimes it freezes for some reason. Please get in touch with him to get the theme done or modify the theme directly:
- Mashup development kit
(similar to Infinity, but widget-ready and with a style-switcher)
Motivation behind the design
Here are some insights about the design process and development from the designer himself.
"Thanks to Vitaly for this great opportunity! I have to admit that I'm not very good at telling stories, basically it's always been hard to explain every detail on how I get it done and why I did this and that… Partly the idea for this theme is based upon my own theme which has a slightly personal touch and uses vibrant and appealing colors. With some rambling designs and fancy head imagery, I've tried to put all pieces together to make the theme literally stand out.
Among other things, the start page window of the Infinity theme has thumnails and offers delicious-integration.
I tried to keep it as simple as possible, unlike regular post entries style, with Wordpress custom filed functions. I've used them to show off image titles next to the thumbnails. This design decision is intended to catch reader's attention in a better way, and it could be a huge advantage for portfolios where designers want to present their photos or design works.
I hope you enjoy this theme and I would love to hear any comments you have about my new theme, and for more information please visit my website. Or feel free to ask any questions regarding the theme in comments to this post — I'll do my best to answer them!"
Posting preview of the Infinity theme
Thank you, Yichi. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.
Special requirements
- The theme has no problems in modern browsers and also works fine in Internet Explorer 6.
- Wordpress 2.5 or higher is required.
- Some plug-ins are required for the theme to work (all of them are included in the download-package).
Last but not least…
We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.
If you would like to release a high-quality free font, a Wordpress-theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set please contact us — we would like to support you (both financially and with the broad coverage on Smashing Magazine).
You may be interested in the following free Wordpress-themes as well: