Some of the strongest trends in contemporary WordPress theme design are minimalism and monochrome. Simplifying sites in terms of both layout and colour scheme creates some stunning results – unfussy, stylish, accessible and beautiful to view. The monochrome aesthetic, in black and white or one-colour combinations, is one of the best options for professional and timeless feeling sites. This post brings together a selection of beautiful monochromatic WordPress themes, a mixture of the best premium and free designs currently available on the Internet.
Premium:
Monochrome Pro
Monochrome Pro is a magazine-style premium theme from Graph Paper Press. The design has a stylish grey colour scheme and features a homepage slideshow that cycles through selected featured posts and a category grid anchoring the bottom of the fold. This theme is ideal for news, magazine and professional blogging niches, and Graph Paper Press offer a range of pricing options depending on the user’s requirements.
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Modfolio
Modfolio is another premium theme from Graph Paper Press, a minimalist portfolio theme for displaying image-lead content in a smart, dark, monochrome platform. Users may enable and disable more than ten homepage layout options, change the theme’s colour scheme, apply advertising code and add contact information in the theme options page.
Specialist
This premium theme is aimed at small business websites and other professional applications, with simple clean aesthetics and powerful back-end features. The Specialist theme offers the options to select colours for every element, but it probably looks at its best in its original black and white monochrome setting. Theme developer Templatic offers the choice of two pricing plans for lifetime subscriptions and support: $65 for a single use on one website, or $99 for unlimited use on multiple websites.
iBusiness
Templatic also offer iBusiness, a theme enabling users to establish a quick and easy online presence for corporate businesses. The theme boasts a minimalist, monochrome and highly professional aesthetic, and may be used for any number of business applications. iBusiness has a variety of premium features and options, and is available at Templatic’s standard pricing rates.
MMW One
MMW One is a simple and clean theme with five colour scheme options including a cool grayscale option. The theme features Lightbox integration, widget-ready sidebar, sortable front-end sidebar, multiple back-end theme options, Mootools dropdown navigation and Google analytics. Theme developer Madmenwalking offers the theme at $27, or $25 for pre-paid customers.
Photoland
Photoland is a premium theme from WPZoom, developed specifically for photoblogs, image showcases and portfolios. The clean minimalist monochrome aesthetic is designed to showcase images in a subtle, stylish and unobtrusive folio setting. WPZoom pricing plans include $49 for license to use the theme on a single website, or $99 for multiple use.
Polished
ElegantThemes presents Polished, a theme aimed at creating smooth and refined darkly monochromatic blog niches. The theme is designed to be cross-browser compatible; advert, gravatar and widget-ready; XHTML and CSS valid; and features custom thumbnail images and smooth tab-less design. ElegantThemes offers a yearly subscription of $39, providing access to 45 themes, premium support and regular updates.
BusinessCard
BusinessCard is another premium theme offered by ElegantThemes. As the name suggests, this theme is designed to present an online business card providing information in a clear, concise and accessible format. The page-based, CMS-style template combines all pages into a single fast –loading tabbed area. BusinessCard is a great way to share important information with visitors and potential clients, and is available as part of ElegantTheme’s annual membership subscription.
Modblogger-Tech
Modblogger-Tech is a cool monochrome theme created by BlogOhBlog.com. The theme is dark, sleek and stylish, ideal for any modern technology-orientated blog niche. Modblogger-Tech theme features include WordPress 2.5 compatibility, Gravatar support, page-based dropdown menus, formatted tags, jQuery-based Accordion to display featured products, two widget-ready sidebars and is fully XHTML compliant. The theme developers offer the complete package for $89.99 including full post-sales support.
Free:
DePo Skinny
Designer Derek’s Powazek DePo Skinny is a super-simple monochromatic theme with a single central 500-pixel-wide column, title and menu header, and a row of seven Flickr thumbnails across the top of the homepage.
Grid Focus
Derek Punsalan presents Grid Focus, a black and white theme with the only touches of colour coming in the form of blue links. The theme features three widget-enabled columns and a prominent navigation bar with ample room to share important pages. The theme’s coding is stripped down to allow users to make many customizations.
Manifest
Jim Barruad presents Manifest, a clean and streamlined theme with a simple black and white colour scheme, 500-pixel-wide centered column, no sidebars, no widgets and no distractions from the blog content.
Black on White
Black on White is a classic monochromatic theme using Georgia font, black text on white background for the main content complimented by black headers and footers with white text on each page.
Oulipo
Oulipo is an elegant grid-based theme with a stylish grayscale colour scheme. Designer Andrea Mignolo states that the title Oulipo derives from the 20th Century French literary of the same name, and as such the theme has a suitably strong typographical design.
Cardeo Minimal
Cardeo Minimal is a cool minimalist theme delivered by developer Cardeo. The design features three columns, large image on the homepage, Twitter status integration and a really stylish monochrome aesthetic with grey text and masses of white space.
Voluptua!
Volutptua! Is a high-impact theme from Upstart Blogger Ashley Morgan, employing bold Swiss-style typography in black with a nicely muted background page colour.
Moleskine
Also from Upstart Blogger, the Moleskine WordPress theme is a monochrome design inspired by Moleskine notebooks, with strong typographical two-column layout and subtle background gradient to replicate the off-white paper of the Moleskine books. The simple colour scheme and layout make this theme ideal for personal blogs and journal niches.
Blackout
Designer Rajbir Dhaliwal’s Blackout is a striking theme with bright white text on a plain black background. The theme’s features include two fixed-width widget ready columns, right sidebar, square corners and threaded comments.
Modern Clix
Rodrigo Galindez presents Modern Clix, a minimal monochrome blog theme inspired by Swiss-style design using Arial and Helvetica fonts, grid layout, plenty of white space to allow the black text to breath and the focus on strong typography and readability. The theme is standards compliant, validates as HTML 1.0 Strict and is completely cross-browser compatible.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow is an elegant modernist black and white theme from designer Andrea Pacquola. The theme is based around a three-column layout with sidebars suitable for static content or widgets, designed for WordPress 2.6 and cross- browser compatibility.
OmegaX
OmegaX is a brilliant minimal monochrome theme with two fixed-width columns, black and white colour scheme and light and airy aesthetic. Taiwan-based web designer MUKI Space* presents this theme.
Sharpfolio
Sharpfolio from WebRevolutionary is a beautifully designed theme aimed at designers, artists, photographers or any creative to create an online portfolio. The theme is crafted to allow the focus to fall on users’ work free from distractions, with a superbly stylish grayscale interface.
Black n White
Black n White is a monochrome theme from Zack Live. The streamlined design is widget-ready with a right sidebar; has options for RSS feed and header logo; WordPress 2.7 compatible supporting threaded comments, sticky posts and comment pages.
Magatheme
Bryan Helmig’s Magatheme is cool monochromatic theme with a minimalist magazine aesthetic. The theme features include a three-column, golden ratio reduced layout; six sidebars; completely valid XHTML and CSS, WordPress 2.7 compatibility, zebra striped comments and highlighted author comments.
Minimalist
Minimalist is a brilliantly graceful and simple theme from Techdesigns. The theme features no images and a clean two-column layout with masses of white space, offers a selection of colour schemes, but is at its very best in its original monochromatic grayscale elegance.
This post was written exclusively for Orphicpixel by James Adams, a designer and marketer working at a supplier of HP cartridges where he reviews products like HP 351XL ink and posts on their blog about art in advertising.