What I Built and What I Loved
Sash is the theme I built—two columns, grunge aesthetic, no special features beyond whatever you wire in yourself. Not laziness; design principle. If you install it, it’s yours to own, which means you need to know what you’re doing. Not for beginners.
After that the choices get more interesting. Alvin Woon has documented opinions about Jessica Simpson’s tits on his site, which, by my personal theory, predisposes a person toward clean design instincts—and Wonderwall bears that out. Straight lines, strong proportions, a left-side image that anchors every post and gives the layout something to hold onto. The customization overhead is real, but the result justifies it. Derek Punsalan’s 5ThirtyOne, now at version 2.0, takes the opposite approach: light frame, good bones, adaptable to almost anything. It’s the kind of design that gets out of the way, which is harder to execute than the feature-heavy alternatives make it look.
Jay Kwong’s JsTheme is the feature-heavy alternative. First impression is genuine awe; second is mild concern about load times. More functionality packed in than most commercial themes combined, which is either a selling point or a warning label depending on how you run a blog. The designer was already working on an improved version when I checked—the current build needs optimization before it’s really ready. Phu Ly’s Simpla is everything JsTheme is not: white, minimal, easy for anyone to set up. The catch is ubiquity. I’ve seen the unmodified version on too many sites to count. It needs something done to it. I once added a few bloodstains to mine and it immediately became its own thing.
Julien De Luca’s Freshy has the same problem—a swappable header image means everyone swaps it and calls it finished. The underlying structure holds up well when someone actually commits to customizing it. Kaushal Sheth’s Fluid Solution is the one I’d reach for if I wanted something that reads as slightly off-center: pink, black, and blue on white, a logo that adapts quickly, a general vibe of mild anarchism. Patrick Behrend’s XV takes that instinct further—hot pink, no sidebar, nothing that doesn’t earn its presence. Back to basics as genuine design philosophy.
The Netlash team’s Spreeksel goes the other direction: colorful, poppy, conventional layout, easy to personalize. Cheerful in a way that will suit some people and exhaust others. Nofie Iman’s Andharra is flexible enough to function as either a personal blog or a small company site, which is a specific and useful kind of versatility—the logo scales cleanly and the structure stays legible at different content densities.
The most interesting find is Oakyoon Cha’s Stripes, which I tracked down through Korean design blogs rather than any standard WordPress directory. The advantage of looking beyond the Western theme ecosystem is exactly this: designs that haven’t saturated the landscape yet, built by people with different visual references. Stripes is organized and alive at the same time, and not having seen it on every third blog I’d visited made it immediately more appealing. Worth the extra effort to find.