Say you’re looking for a theme for your obscure literary publication. Or perhaps it’s a poetry site. Or something else very artsy. Voila: Press! This Wordpress theme is the one for you. The homepage showcases a lot of content while still remaining very clean and visually appealing.

Category-level pages put the focus on photos, so make sure that is important to you. One minor complaint: the styling of the comment area is a big bold for my taste, but other than that, lovely.

Developer: Obox Design

Features:

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Wordpress Designer, the shop behind Ashes and Smoke Signal is out with this “grunge” theme.

Has the look and feel of a more intimate … well, blog. And if I had to pick a musical genre I think I’d go for electro over grunge. Additionally, I’d classify this theme in the robust blog camp. Nice features include the design, big footer and 2nd tier of featured stories. Like the other Wordpress Designer themes, this includes image resizing and gravatars.

Love the prominent RSS feed, as well as the tabbed treatment up top. Could do with some integrated advertising, but I guess that wouldn’t be very grunge now, would it.

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By the same maker as minimalist Visualization and the Gridline series, Monochrome is a visually arresting theme that places a lot of emphasis on images. So if your photos are not as great as the ones featured on the site, then you may way to think again. Monochrome has a lot of solid magazine-style features, like category-based-navigation (with dropdown subcategories), as well as category representation under the main feature and above the big footer. Check out variations Monochrome Gallery, Monochrome Author and Monochrome Lite.

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This paid theme’s primary magazine feature is a featured articles capability — articles categorized under “featured” occupy the main well. While that’s a neat way to deal with the issue of which stories get prominent/more real estate, the downside of this approach is that articles are bucketed under one category instead of perhaps the categories that they would more naturally fit in. Category navigation is in the big footer.

Sites utilizing the theme:
http://jaypeeonline.net/
http://www.outlawdesignblog.com/

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Gorgeous and clean Wordpress theme with a two tiered-navigation menu — page-based and category-based. The majority of the homepage is taken up by the featured story (appears to be the latest story). Nice features include a slick “most popular” sidebar with popular, comments, latest and tags. Another unique feature is the robust footer which manages to pack in six stories in three selected categories. Currently does not come with advertising already implemented.

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From the same maker (Graph Paper Press) as Visualization, this minimalist theme itself has a number of variations — Gridline Lite and Gridline News.

This theme is similar to Visualization, except the 2nd tier of featured stories are adjacent to the main story instead of beneath them — a layout I personally prefer. The main nav menu also incorporates both pages and categories (which means that subcategories are relegated to a drop down). I like the theme’s look-and-feel, but think it would benefit from categories directly on the nav instead of under Categories. Another minor point — it would be nice if the search box was bigger and more prominent.

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Beautiful theme. Definitely in the design-y camp and probably less for those who are interested in a text-heavy site. But I see applications of this including a recipe site, an agency website, or perhaps a travel site — anything where a visual representation of the information would have more of an impact.

Unique features: LOVE the text and # of comments overlaid on images, simple and effective color scheme, and the list of categories with counts of posts elegantly implemented in the footer.

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What I like about this paid theme is the great job it does showcasing a lot of content very effectively. The HP manages to squeeze in 13+ article options (1 main well, 5 recent stories, 4 secondary stories with image (in slider), and then 3 more articles (with 3 links each!), yet maintains a clean and balanced feel. Same goes for category/subcategory landing pages, which very gracefully highlights one story, gives another four stories less emphasis, then finally offers up 8 story headlines. Some other very nice touches include a breadcrumb, except in English — i.e. instead of Category > Subcategory > SubsubCategory, this theme has “You are here: Home -> Election ’08 -> Huckabee Angling for Debate With McCain”. Another nice touch is the article -level pages, where color zoning highlights “More from this category” and “More from this author.”

Comments are currently located in the robust footer, which may not be ideal for some, but is probably easy enough to change. Another benefit is the auto image resizer described as follows: “custom script that automatically crops and resizes images – no more creating two or three versions of each image.”

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