We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we try to do our best to make the Web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore, we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.
Today we are glad to release Cellar Heat: a free professional WordPress theme created by Evan Eckard. The design of this theme focuses on patterns and typography, and it comes in two flavors. It is designed especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
Download the theme for free!
You can use the theme freely for all of your projects without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both the 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 plan to release your modification, please ask our permission first.- Demo: Cellar Heat Dark Demo
- Preview: Dark version and Light version
- Download: Cellar Heat Dark (.zip, 0.8 Mb) and Cellar Heat Light (.zip, 0.8 Mb)
- PSD-sources (20 .psd-files, 30.5 Mb)
- Release post on Evan Eckard’s blog
Motivation behind the design
Here are some insights into the design and development process from the designer himself.“After creating the Gumball Special theme based on an older website of mine called Hellbiscuit, I wanted to create a theme similar in layout that wasn’t image-driven like that one. This layout is a unique design that I produced over a couple of years ago, and it’s finally being released.
“At first I wanted to do a dark theme that would contrast with the Gumball Special design. But after creating the dark version, I decided to produce a light version as well. The only real difference between the themes is the images and style sheets. Ninety percent of the code is the same between the light and dark versions.
“Cellar Heat has a few cool features built in: gravatars are enabled, excerpts of previous and next posts appear on each page, the theme is widgetized (although I can’t guarantee they will look hot), no plug-ins need to be installed and a recent comments section appears in the footer.
Feel free to modify the code and design to fit your tastes; just please leave the footer links intact.”
Thank you, Evan. We appreciate your work and good intentions.
Last but not least…
We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we may feature you in one of our upcoming posts.If you would like to release a free high-quality font, a WordPress theme, some wallpapers or an icon set, please contact us. We would like to support you, too (both financially and with the broad coverage of Smashing Magazine).
You may be interested in the following free WordPress themes as well:
(al)