We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we 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 Simply Ornate — a free professional Wordpress-theme created by Evan Eckard. This theme was designed with the main focus being on patterns and typography and comes in 5 flavours. It is designed 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.
- Live Demo
- Release post on Evan Eckard's blog
- Simply Ornate “Twirl II” (blue)
- Simply Ornate “Royal Red” (deep red)
- Simply Ornate “D.A.R.K.” (military green)
- Simply Ornate “Pinkie” (pink)
- Simply Ornate “Pixel Gray” (grayscale)
Motivation behind the design
Here are some insights about the design process and development from the designer himself.
"I tried to make this theme as basic as possible. It uses one plugin (which you can find in the plugin folder within the zip file) to include a flickr feed. Just drop the “flickrrss.php” file in your plugins directory and activate within the dashboard. You can set how many photos appear in the feed, I’d suggest staying with multiples of 4 to keep the design balanced.
The theme also includes a prototype-based tab effect (via stereotabs) that allows users to browse latest posts, comments and tags. The front page is set up to show excerpts of your 4 latest posts, and also includes a mini-nav in the upper right side to allow for page navigating.
The theme also uses a ton of png transparency that does work cross-browser (even in IE 6).
Thank you, Evan. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.
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: