Design, Develop, and Grow
Following Mondays post on WordPress Themes White Edition, there is today, Tumblr Themes Grey and White Edition.
Even though Tumblr is still struggling with down time, the service popularity hasn’t decreased a bit. With the enormous offer of themes available, it’s hard to make your Tumblr look like MySpace. But not everyone has a good taste, so I often come across ugly Tumblr sites. To have a site with an ugly theme borders on a crime considering all the high quality free themes.
The amount of Tumblr weblog is growing steadily each day, a lot of users forgo their own weblog setup on a hosting for Tumblr. It began as a platform to post small bits to the web but has attracted users that use it as a full blown weblog service. Logically Tumblr has been expanding their services and growing with their users needs.
Several online services and companies use Tumblr for their weblog instead of keeping it on their own service, handy for if their website experiences downtime. This shows how easy it is is to get a nice weblog up and running with Tumblr.
The amount of themes available is also growing steadily, ranging from the wackiest theme to some very slick ones. I compiled a list of twenty great free Tumblr themes that you can install right away.
Even on Tumblr you get a grid based design, it’s not Khoi but it sure is nice for a free theme. If you are a fan of grids this is the theme for you.
Simple, clean and good aligned. A good theme for lots of text or single photo posts.
This theme begs for attention, unruly lines, red and some graphics.
Stationary is a perfect theme for a weblog with book reviews, pens, notebooks, anything paper.
This one is excellent for a photoblog as the layout has almost no to none distraction.
One word: Bokeh!
The background reminds a bit of the iPhone dock.
I was recently asked to convert one of my existing original WordPress themes to a Tumblr theme. As far as I know, there is no quick and easy way to do this- and comparing the WordPress template tags and the Tumblr theme code convinced me of one thing: I was going to have to rebuild the theme from scratch.
At first, the task seemed daunting. Tumblr’s variables- from “block”s to “PortraitURL”s- were completely alien to me. Then I thought back to when I first looked at WordPress code, how confused I was at the time, and how comfortable I am with it today.
And just like that- no more fear! Tumblr’s code was just something I’d just have to learn.
Here are some steps to get started designing your own Tumblr themes:
Read and bookmark this page; it’ll become your best friend throughout this process. At the same time, make sure you…
It’s important to know exactly what you can do with a Tumblr theme, and one of the best ways to do this is to look through their official theme repository. Each theme listed here has a Preview button, so you can get a feel of how it works at a generic level.
If you don’t have a Tumblr blog already, I strongly suggest signing up for one (it’s free). You can use this for testing, and who knows- you might just like it enough to use it “for real”.
It’s how most of us got started coding in the first place: take something existing, take it apart, and study how it works. It isn’t possible to download themes at the Theme Garden, but there are some generous souls out there who have made their custom themes available for download. Check out DigitalThom, Franklin Street, or Munich.
Everybody wants options, and it’s actually quite simple to enable customization in a Tumblr theme. For example, adding the {CustomCSS} variable will allow users of your theme to do some visual tweaking without having to touch your markup. For more ways to add customization options, see the guide on Tumblr.
Do you design Tumblr themes?
