Design your way

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

If you’re a graphic designer, photographer or any other visual creative, it is now almost essential that you have an online showcase of your finest pieces of work. There are hundreds of different options for setting up an online portfolio, whether by a dedicated image platform such as Flickr, or an image focused blogging service such as Tumblr.

One system that has evolved alongside the web and allows for a much higher degree of customization than an existing service is a self-hosted WordPress site. This allows for the use of custom themes that can turn what at an initial glance is a fairly standard blogging CMS into practically any type of site needed.

Grid themes are particularly well suited to portfolio websites; the following are a collection of some of the best responsive WordPress grid themes available.

Super Grid

A Pinterest styled theme ideal for a showcase or portfolio and retina ready for i-devices.

Wave

A clean design with several different layout options for artists and other creatives to show off their work, or simply publish a regular text post.

Blogrid

A full screen multipurpose theme for a gallery or blog with 9 templates for different layouts and styles.

Gridlocked

A minimalistic theme with animated shuffle effect when resizing the page, works as a creative showcase or a Tumblr style blog.

Gaida

An ideal theme for a photo portfolio, including two different image layouts and a widget for showing off a Flickr gallery.

Exhibit

A theme with plenty of built in customisation options suitable for any content, whether video, image or text.

Oldcar

A colourful theme suitable for a personal blog or portfolio. Built in a Tumblr like style with a customizable home page through use of shortcodes.

Hydra

A full width theme that works perfectly on both desktop and mobile views. The theme is well suited for a photography or creative business.

Squaregrid

A portfolio theme with five unique pre-set layouts that support images and videos from Vimeo and Youtube.

Division

A full width theme that includes with a drag and drop page builder for creating custom layouts, that can work solely with only images or with both images and text.

Pravda

A Highly customisable theme that can be used solely as a blog or to show off photos and images in a portfolio.

Matrix

A tile based theme influenced by the Windows 8 interface. Each tile can be customized in different ways including animation and colours.

Sartana

An excellent design for a photo showcase with social sharing option on image hover and some lovely animation effects on loading a page.

Showoff

A full width tiled theme that works fantastically for displaying photography, video or graphics in a full width display.

Mini Studio

A minimalistic layout perfect for a portfolio of rectangular images in the style of a Tumblr blog.

Modern Portfolio

A grid layout of square images ideal for a portfolio, and also includes a regular blog layout.

Cubus

A gallery theme well suited for a designer or photographer. The theme offers a number of different display options and some great image hover effects.

If you are looking for an extraordinary grid theme for your WordPress blog, then hopefully one of the above will fit the bill. If there’s a fantastic grid theme out there we have overlooked please let us know in the comments.

If you want to buy the themes, and not just admire their design, here are the links where you can purchase them (without referral link):