Design Mode: A Free Portfolio Block Theme Designed for Freelancers and Agencies

The rely for WordPress block themes has reached 137. It’s a far cry from the 500 block themes WordPress Govt Director Josepha Haden-Chomphosy set as a aim for 2022, however the quantity is steadily climbing as theme authors discover their footing and uncover how rapidly block themes could be created.

Brian Gardner is throwing his hat into the ring once more together with his newest launch. Design Mode is a brand new block theme created for freelancers and companies to showcase their providers and work. After its launch, a number of of Gardener’s contemporaries, fellow theme designers, remarked on how refreshing it’s to see a block theme with “actual world use circumstances,” as so many appear to be geared at bloggers.

Design Mode options Outfit, a geometrical sans serif Google font, designed by Rodrigo Fuenzalida, a Venezuelan kind designer primarily based in Santiago de Chile. It’s used for each headings and paragraph textual content all through the theme.

The demo offers the very best concept of what the theme appears to be like like with a curated set of photos, titles, captions, menus, and buttons all crammed with content material. As soon as put in and activated on a brand new website, the theme appears to be like similar to the demo however has a placeholder picture as a substitute of the photographs used within the demo. It’s because the photographs didn’t have the fitting licensing for distribution on WordPress.org, however the way in which it ships has the benefit of giving customers a visible clean slate for these featured sections.

Design Mode consists of 10 totally different patterns, that are basically all points of the design deconstructed into components. There are a number of patterns for sections with cowl, heading, textual content, and button, a question grid with three columns, a piece with textual content and separators, a footer, and a header with website title and navigation completely spaced. The theme additionally conveniently features a entire web page sample that may immediately reproduce the homepage within the demo.

Design Mode is an opinionated theme. Customers can modify colours for background, textual content, and hyperlinks, and modify numerous templates by way of full-site enhancing, but it surely doesn’t include further fashion variations. Private blogs could profit from a kaleidoscope of favor variations however a well-designed portfolio theme doesn’t normally lend itself effectively to vast variations in fashion. On this case fewer choices is an effective factor that ought to protect the easy palette the theme packages.

This can be a very quick theme by itself. Gardner studies that Design Mode scores 99 and 100 on Google web page pace for cell/desktop. Relying on what plugins and optimizations a consumer has energetic, this theme might be a sensible choice for performance-conscious WordPress customers.

Design Mode is Gardner’s third block theme within the listing. It bears some similarities to his black and white minimalist Avant-Garde theme however has extra of a pleasant showcase vibe that’s appropriate for private portfolios, companies, and any sort of service enterprise that may profit from a sublime, structured design.

Design Mode is available for free on WordPress.org or inside WordPress by way of the admin themes browser.