Vintage and Blues WordPress Themes
In this post we release 2 free high-quality WordPress magazine-themes. The themes include full PSD-templates and can be used without any restrictions whatsoever. The themes were commissioned by Smashing Magazine exclusively for our readers and designed by Wendell Fernandes. As you may know, since the beginning of the year, each release on Smashing Magazine has been dedicated to a specific theme or topic that could be useful in your next project. This release focuses on the vintage-look and on the magazine-style.
Vintage: A Free WordPress Theme
As the title suggests, we wanted to release a WordPress theme that would reflect the vintage, old-style look and thus look attractive, unusual and memorable. We discussed retro and vintage designs already, but we wanted the theme to literally stand out – not through its style, but also through its structure. Therefore we were more than happy when the designers suggested a design with a magazine-look.
The result is the Vintage WordPress theme, a 2-column theme with various illustrations and icons. Please notice that the theme requires WordPress 2.7 to work.
The theme is available for free download and can be used for any purposes without any restrictions whatsoever. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.
- full image preview
- live demo
- download the theme (.zip, 0.4 Mb – now widget-ready, thanks to Basilis Kanonidis)
- download the psd-sources (.psd, .zip, 9.3 Mb)
- release post on Dellustrations.com
Behind the scenes
As usual, here are some insights from the designers themselves:
The reasoning behind this theme is simply, taking us back to an old-school look and feel, reminding where our fathers came from and the fathers of our fathers. It’s simply remarkable to think, that people lived a full and abundant life inside a “vintage” world and brought us all here to this date and day.
Today we can look back and watch and admire their struggles, fights, victories, failures, submission and humbleness. Today we can see how far we’ve come and how far we can reach. This theme brings us back to the beginning of it all, and remind us of 2009 as a year of reflection for all we’ve accomplished, and what we can achieve moving forward. We would like you to enjoy the theme.
Yours truly,
Dellustrations
Blues: A Free WordPress Theme
This theme is a variation of the theme presented above; however, it tries not to focus on the vintage look but on a simple, clean, and user-friendly design. This theme was commissioned by Smashing Magazine exclusively for our readers and designed by the Dellustrations design agency.
The theme is available for free download and can be used for any purposes without any restrictions whatsoever. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.
- full image preview
- live demo
- download the theme (.zip, 0.4 Mb – now widget-ready, thanks to Basilis Kanonidis)
- download the psd-sources (.psd, .zip, 3.3 Mb)
- release post on Dellustrations.com
Thanks, guys, we appreciate your efforts!
Suggestions for particular WordPress themes?
What themes would you like to be released on Smashing Magazine next? What are you looking for? Or, more importantly, what kind of themes shouldn’t we release any more? We appreciate your input in the comments to this post!
Wendell
January 28th, 2009 9:25 amThank you smashing magazine for releasing these!!!
http://www.dellustrations.com/blog
Pavel Ciorici
January 28th, 2009 9:28 amGreat Themes SM!
GHC
January 28th, 2009 9:28 amAwesome thank you!
Ektz
January 28th, 2009 9:29 amGreat Themes!
you guys rock!
Sim
January 28th, 2009 9:29 amthat’s one freaking heavy background image
DKumar M.
January 28th, 2009 9:32 amNice theme Guys…. Much Appreciated!! Good to have some fresh looks.
Ben Jacob
January 28th, 2009 9:32 amWow another wonderful share… I liked the Vintage theme verymuch. !
Eddy Munn
January 28th, 2009 9:36 amNice designs, very very good illustrations included in them. :)
ender
January 28th, 2009 9:36 ami love the vintage theme a lot – but there’s a nasty horizontal scroll on a 1024 screen. it did seem to take a long time to load fully, 388kb for the bkgd image does seem kind of excessive. too bad – it’s a beautiful theme.
Ali "Greeeen"
January 28th, 2009 9:37 amSuper sweet work ‘dell :)
koffiekitten
January 28th, 2009 9:40 amA wordpress theme for a cms website for small businesses would be great. A lot of themes look too much like a blog and I think that as wordpress is so easy to use that small business would be really helped with suitable themes.
vukidrock
January 28th, 2009 9:40 amgreat post, thank u very much
Wendell
January 28th, 2009 9:44 amThank you guys! Much appreciate it!
Nate Fieweger
January 28th, 2009 9:50 amThose are some awesome themes. A set of themes I would like to see would be theme modifications of ComicPress (http://mindfaucet.com/comicpress/) If not some created themes, a tutorial on how to integrate a free theme with ComicPress.
Michael
January 28th, 2009 9:52 amIt looks pretty boring. And the background images are too huge, why did you do them so big? Is the theme complete? It looks incomplete to me.
dams
January 28th, 2009 9:54 amits everywhere huh.
Ehab
January 28th, 2009 9:55 amWoooooooooooo :O Really, Reallly Smashing !
Wendell
January 28th, 2009 9:57 amNext time we’ll do one “lighter”. But thank you for your input!
aravind
January 28th, 2009 10:00 amVintage looks awesome.. =)
Michael Knight
January 28th, 2009 10:00 amId like to see themes for Expression Engine, Joomla and Drupal.
Wendell
January 28th, 2009 10:03 amWill do. It’s in the queue.
Thank you for the input.
W.
Brian Gottier
January 28th, 2009 10:05 amI’d like to see more standard CSS/XHTML templates. WordPress is OK….
Wendell
January 28th, 2009 10:08 amWill be designing those in the following weeks.
Julian
January 28th, 2009 10:10 amthe theme is not optimized for 1024 x 768?
weird, there are a lot of people using this rezolution :)
great theme….but if you can make it loooking good for 1024×768 it was fantastic :D
Jorge Linares
January 28th, 2009 10:14 amBoth look ridiculous AMAZING, a great piece of artwork put together with wordpress and best of all it’s free so I think we have the right to give the creators a big “Thank You” for the amount of time and creativity put together in this themes.
Keep up the good work guys!
Adam S
January 28th, 2009 10:23 amI love this site, I love the WordPress posts especially, and your themes are fantastic. I am using a modified version of wp_christmas you guys posted, but the blue one is really nice. Well done!
I’d love to see the Smashing Magazine theme available for download. Your comments template is gorgeous.
Joey Sichol
January 28th, 2009 10:29 amI’d love to see a well-done, minimalist newspaper / magazine theme, an iphone-formatted accordian-style 1-column layout and/or a Timeline theme, with horizontal scrolling and clickable date points/posts.
I find a lot of the themes are a little too specific to modify easily.
readywpthemes
January 28th, 2009 10:47 amBoth of them are great but they don’t support transparent .png images by IE6 and they don’t fit to 1024×768 resolution.
jonathan
January 28th, 2009 10:55 amLooking nice.
I’ve got a suggestion; have been looking for inspiration to make a sports-club (basketball) website based on wordpress. With a lot of different content, and a lot of experience. Am really interested in what you’d make out of that since i don’t have the wordpress-theme building capabilities.
Good chance a nice design would be really used for our site.
crypta
January 28th, 2009 11:01 amI agree with koffiekitten :”A wordpress theme for a cms website for small businesses would be great. A lot of themes look too much like a blog and I think that as wordpress is so easy to use that small business would be really helped with suitable themes.”
Wendell
January 28th, 2009 11:16 am@Jonathan – Would love to create those themes for you! Send an email… we’ll chat about it.
MattS
January 28th, 2009 11:19 amThose are some kickass themes =o
laurence
January 28th, 2009 11:56 ama wordpress theme, easy to modify, which look like a website and not a blog, would be great.
Thanks for all your work. smashingmag is really ma favorite.
laurence from france
kevin
January 28th, 2009 12:34 pmI as well would like to see some great CSS templates. Being a little bit new to the game of xhtml and css, I cannot find one single place online that has “amazing” free css based templates for download. I really would like them to pick apart and learn from – seems like the people making the good ones are keeping them for themselves….. Great themes guys..
Mitch_Nash
January 28th, 2009 12:38 pmAbsolutely love these free wordpress themes. Please keep them coming.
Cosmin
January 28th, 2009 12:41 pmwow, this is incredible!
awesome theme, congratulations to the developers and thank you SM!
Connie
January 28th, 2009 12:54 pm@Kevin,
have a look at http://www.freewpthemes.net/
the themes are free, CSS – based and quite interesting! Better than many others…
and very good to learn from for beginners!
Alexias
January 28th, 2009 12:55 pmGreat theme.I can’t believe it’s for free!!!
Valerio
January 28th, 2009 1:44 pmI’m Italian and I’m very proud to look Vespa’s style.
Tomb
January 28th, 2009 2:04 pmNice themes. But I really want the description to tell me how the slideshow works.
Carlos
January 28th, 2009 2:17 pmGreat themes. Very nicely done. Love the color palette and the functionality. It is a little bit of a bummer it is too big for the 1024 px format. But for free, it is awesome. But edit the CSS and there should be no problem.
Thanks.
Carlos
January 28th, 2009 2:19 pmGreat theme, Great look and functionality. A bit of a bummer it isn’t 1024 optimzed but they are giving us the PSD and a little CSS tweeks should take care of all that. Thanks all as always. Great work.
Murat SIR
January 28th, 2009 2:36 pmthnx very much sm! :D
Okibi
January 28th, 2009 3:57 pmMeh, I like the designs but all this WordPress crapola reminds me of Geocities or Myspace. Lets focus on purpose built graphic design not regurgitated themes and icon sets. What’s next flaming gifs and dancing babies?
Liza
January 28th, 2009 6:34 pmIt’s great as a free theme but it seems to be missing the proper search function, clickable RSS feed, and a working carousel. Also, the background could be optimized for faster loading time. Like I said great visuals but it seems rushed and unfinished. In the end the most important features aren’t usable.
- Talking about Vintage theme.
lilidmu
January 28th, 2009 7:19 pmthank you, awesomenesses! but i’m thinking of more simple and elegant themes, light and easy to modify of course. these are too heavy.
April
January 28th, 2009 7:47 pmI’d love to see some themes that allow you to use WP as both a shop (showcase product images) and a blog. Lots of crafters and artists out there looking for something that’s more about images than posts.
sal azad
January 28th, 2009 8:21 pmLoveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ittttttttttttttttttt!!!! Thx Smashing… and Thx dellustrations!!!
shashi arya
January 28th, 2009 8:48 pmThe word is WOW! cant stop adoring this themes.
THnx SM and Dellustrations
Mike M.
January 28th, 2009 9:23 pmEven with high-speed connections these days that background image is no where near practical for general audiences or high-traffic sites.
jophin
January 28th, 2009 9:52 pmgreat themes,anybody know how controll the banner image sliding?
Kumail.H.T
January 28th, 2009 10:11 pmThat is one horrific theme. I expect much better from sm.
Antilogic
January 29th, 2009 12:22 amNow that is smashing!
Kuris Kuris
January 29th, 2009 1:00 ami love both themes! their cool and cute designs really smashes! :D
Nakiloe
January 29th, 2009 1:07 amI’m impressed by all the little details that made theses themes stand out! :-D
gNcWebmaster
January 29th, 2009 1:33 amThanks for themes. It’s really beautiful themes.
survivor
January 29th, 2009 2:52 amThe search field on both themes are horrible. The text in the field isn’t cut off properly before the graphical element.
Also; the newspaper with rss icon should be a link to the rss-feed, otherwise it isn’t a good graphical element to be placed next to the search field… Think about usability people!
Ciursă Ionuţ
January 29th, 2009 10:59 amI like this themes. Thanks for sharing with us!
I would like to see here some clean and sharp wordpress themes.
Larson
January 29th, 2009 12:34 pmLove these thanks so much
Love to see more like this style
Larson
Mark
January 29th, 2009 2:49 pmGreat themes. Would love to see a portfolio one. Cheers
Nany
January 29th, 2009 3:12 pmAwsome! and free! … , …… !!!!!!!! Wait!!!! Am I dreaming? |- 0.o -|
Karu
January 29th, 2009 7:48 pmwow lovely themes :)
Abu Shamil
January 29th, 2009 10:28 pmGreat themes !!
AleMiRvlzn
January 30th, 2009 8:30 amGrungy and Young!!!! I need grungy and young
kimee
January 30th, 2009 11:37 pmfantastic theme.
madno
January 31st, 2009 7:40 ami like this theme.
Very cool…
and surprisingly.
Its free!!
Toad Press
January 31st, 2009 7:52 amI’m willing to bet that themes like these, heavy in graphics, are going to be phased out just like the bulky graphical navigational bars of the late 90′s. Remember the ones where the nav bar took up a third of the screen and looked like some ridiculous futuristic robot? The principle is the same, but somehow better graphics make it look “cleaner”. I think the clean feel will rub off after a few years and you’ll see a return to a more simple look.
Cheers
alansisho
January 31st, 2009 7:01 pmThank you guys, I love this great style in the themes, Congratulations
Buzzlair
January 31st, 2009 10:16 pmits amazing how Dellustrations turns concept and ideas to masterpiece
jan
February 1st, 2009 9:37 amGreat theme, and I am using it for a friend’s site, but I keep getting errors when I try to get back in to edit it. kind of defeats the purpose of having a word press site.
It seems touchy.
http://www.capomaster.com
jan
February 1st, 2009 9:38 amopps forgot the “s”
capomasters.com
MQ Hidayat
February 1st, 2009 4:18 pmNice theme..
I want to try this theme to increased my ability in web design, aspeciallity ini WP theme.
To all, if you want to know my creation, please visit in http://desain.toserblog.net
yusup
February 1st, 2009 6:02 pmnice theme .. great ideas ..
Mitch Nash
February 2nd, 2009 4:33 amNice theme but how do you get the carousel feature to work?
Michelle
February 2nd, 2009 6:30 amBeautiful, thanks!
Bekalius
February 2nd, 2009 11:13 amnice… themes…
Tinh
February 2nd, 2009 5:43 pmGreat theme, I will try this, thanks
zEEROCKz
February 3rd, 2009 2:58 amVintage theme is really inspiring….
Neil
February 3rd, 2009 3:23 amGreat themes, think i will use one of them on one of my sites. Great work :) (Although one point, they are a little slow when loading)
Theresa Medeiros
February 3rd, 2009 10:42 amWendell!
Muiiiiito massa os temas! Parabéns! E obrigada por nos presentear com eles! =)
zEEROCKz
February 4th, 2009 6:18 amHi Smashing Mag and Wendel! I’m converting the Vintage Theme for Blogger. Conversion is almost done and the template will be available very soon for Blogger platform. Your comments would be appreciable in the meantime, thanks.
Check it out:
http://vintage-blogger-template.blogspot.com/
Tomb
February 4th, 2009 7:59 amMy first question did’nt get a answer. So I try again with another question..
When editing the PSDfile.. How do I save it so it becomes the template image files? Without all the text like “learn to design” ect.. This has been a issue for me. SM always have PSDs with there themes. But I just figure out how to use them when there is only one file. Instead of one for header, on for some other image and so on… I hope some kind soul could explane to me how it works. :3
Fiona
January 11th, 2010 8:48 amDid you ever get any answers am also interested in the psd edits any links?
Tal Galili
February 4th, 2009 12:47 pmHi there – I love (love!) your themes.
You asked for an idea’s for new themes, I’ll give you two ideas of blogs I have, which could use some revamp. in the hope you’d find one of them to be interesting to work on:
1) Dance.
I have an aggregator for dance blogs on:
http://www.dancebloggers.com –
for which I would love to have a nice magazine like theme.
2) Food. I have a blog on hummus (yes, the chikpees thing) on:
http://www.humus101.com/EN
I would love for a better theme for it.
Thanks again for your wonderful content,
Tal
Jauhari
February 5th, 2009 6:00 pmWow than ever ;)
Chicago Scoter Club
February 5th, 2009 10:00 pmSo…… Who’s scooter is that?
Dipesh
February 6th, 2009 7:01 amcool themes!!!
David
February 6th, 2009 10:08 pmIs 2swell.com aware of the texture rip from their website? The texture in the header is just a mirrored image of the front page graphic on “2swell.com”.
I don’t want to call steal without knowing the sources and the designers behind this…but, I’m skeptical of the usage on that one.
jeogonz
February 8th, 2009 4:44 pmDid you try to use it because on my website i’ve got a lot of troubleshouting.
So when i choose this theme in the admin i have this two report immediately and a lot of problem if iwant to use it.
So i’m back with another theme
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /homez.65/bootlegg/www/baseballmovie/wp-content/themes/wordpress-brown/functions.php:2) in /homez.65/bootlegg/www/baseballmovie/wp-includes/functions.php on line 698
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /homez.65/bootlegg/www/baseballmovie/wp-content/themes/wordpress-brown/functions.php:2) in /homez.65/bootlegg/www/baseballmovie/wp-includes/functions.php on line 699
teros
February 25th, 2010 5:19 amThe error Warning: Cannot modify header information etc.. is caused by spaces at the top and/or bottom of the functions file….edit and remove any space before and after the php code.
Unfortunately, this only one of quite a few issues with the theme. Seems it was released when it was closer to a template than a theme with links hard coded in, carousel links that lead to nowhere, search thats non-functioning, expected css classes missing, etc.. etc.. Frankly it needs quite a bit of work to be a functioning wordpress theme so I’d only recommend it to people who know their way around wordpress, html, and css and photoshop. Fortunately the psd files are available.
The biggest oversight imo is that it exceeds 1024 x 768 dimensions….I didnt even notice that until reading the comments here as both of my computers run at 1280. I wouldnt dream of putting a site online that couldnt be viewed in 1024 – lots of people still run this resolution. Since I’ve already commited quite a bit of time to customizing this for a site I guess I’m going to have to shrink it down via image editing and css which is kind of a pain in the a$$.
Still, the graphics are pretty sharp and its free without restrictions. That makes it worthy of a thanks.
James W Lane
February 9th, 2009 2:56 pm@jeogonz I have the exact same problem also.
sriganesh
February 10th, 2009 5:39 pmits a broken one.but theme is good
Sam.Lv
February 26th, 2009 5:36 amnice themes!
Cosmin
March 9th, 2009 6:50 amBlue Theme is broken, looks incomplete to me…though it looks nice ;)
bekir
March 10th, 2009 3:01 pmsizler harikasınız,çok teşekkür…thank you
Fredrik
March 11th, 2009 9:36 amHello, I get a this error Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/2/w/woaw7/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes/wordpress-brown/functions.php:2) in /home/2/w/woaw7/www/wordpress/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 850 Are the enyone who knows how to solve this ? WordPress is up and running, installed on 2.7 and works with the other themes, but I get this error when I use the Vintage theme
Storm
March 12th, 2009 8:12 pmVintage theme looks fantastic, but unfortunately it’s wasn’t completed and there are many elements which aren’t working:
- page archive list (Page 1 of 38 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5….. END). That’s just hard-coded via html, not dynamic in Php.
- same deal with the RSS icon
- same deal with the slideshow screen at the top.
There really is no point in releasing incomplete / buggy themes, no matter how good looking they are. All you are doing is wasting people’s time trying to get them to work.
Own goal, Smashing Magazine.
James
March 31st, 2009 5:19 pm@Fredrik: I am facing the same problem. Great theme but error message comes out at the header in wp-admin. Makes me wonder do people just comment before they even try it out?
Code Poetry
April 13th, 2009 11:10 pmNice, gotta save this for my other site. Thanks for the freebies! :)
lutz
maverick
April 17th, 2009 11:04 pmnice looking theme.. :) thanks!
Tyanz Permana
April 23rd, 2009 3:37 amnice works !
Michael
April 23rd, 2009 4:10 pmI’ve found problems with the Blues Theme and don’t know how to fix them.
For example: I went to the admin panel for my site and right away I got an error message that said – “Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at…..”
What is that all about??
If anyone can help me out, please let me know.
Thanks!