I stumbled upon two really sleek, fresh and free WordPress themes today, Empty Canvas and Swift, as I was browsing the Weblog Tools Collection.
Let’s start with Empty Canvas, which I think shows that less is more. The clean layout, which offers plenty of ‘breathing room’ between the elements, brings the content into focus, which is exactly what a good theme should focus on.
The only thing that bothers me is that the font color is a tad too bright; I personally feel that reading text, with low contrast, to be quite tiresome for my eyes. However, that is an easy fix, if you would like to change it, though, and nothing that would prevent me from using this theme.
Something that is interesting to read, but rarely seen, is how a theme designer thought, as a theme was created. However, the creator of Empty Canvas, Adrian Diaconescu, has done just that and put together a comprehensive background story of his theme. You can click here to read the whole story behind Empty Canvas and download it.
The other theme that really caught my eye was, SWIFT, a sleek, fast loading theme with a clean typography, and some SEO tweaks.
SWIFT comes with a vast amount of features, neatly bundled together on its option page, which gives you the ability to make your blog, a bit more personal and unique.
For example, you have 8 different color schemes to choose from and a nifty color picker, to help you out.
Other features are ad management from the option page, popular posts highlighted on the home page, sidebar and footer with four widgetised sections and much more.
One thing that makes SWIFT interesting is that it seems to be under active development. The latest version, 2.0.2, where released today (August 23), plus the creator has posted some of the upcoming features for the theme, as well.
You can read more about the features that SWIFT has to offer and download it through this link.
