Every theme at The Theme Foundry starts out as an idea that is discussed and then put to paper by our designers. We review and refine the design, and then we build it out in HTML so we can see the design come to life in the browser. From there, every theme is constructed from the ground-up (no frameworks) as we try to build upon the successes (and failures) of our previous themes.

This time, we’re proud to present a minimalist masterpiece that is the result of well over a month of back-and-forth hard work from Scott and Drew. The design changed a lot over the development cycle, but as I gaze upon the finished work I can’t help but smile. I think they’ve done it again.

Portfolio is a clean and refined – you guessed it – portfolio theme for elegantly showcasing your client work, photography, videos or artwork.

Portfolio puts all the focus on your work. The light colors and minimal design allow your photos to stand out, grabbing viewers’ attention and enticing them to read more.

The strengths of Portfolio are the

• Homepage and Portfolio page templates for highlighting your work.
• Individual portfolio item display.
• Customization options that allow you to make your site feel “just right”.
• Lovely blog display with lots of easy to use typography options.

Let’s take a quick look at each of these!

The Homepage template

When visitors land on your site, you’ll want to direct them to the most important and most recent blog posts and portfolio items. At the top of the Homepage template, we’ve included a featured slider that can link to any post or portfolio item on your site.

Below that, you’ll see the “Recent Portfolio Items” section, which automatically pulls your most recent items for display on your front page.

View the Homepage template →

The Portfolio page template

We’ve paid special attention to your portfolio (or “showcase”) page, which displays your portfolio items in a grid that scales down to look just as lovely on mobile devices as it does on large-format displays.

View the Portfolio template →

Individual portfolio items

When you click through to a single portfolio item, there is an optional sidebar that can be used to put extra details, a description, your inspiration for the project, or external links to the project website. We’ve added a couple of styling elements that look especially good in the sidebar: blockquotes and external link buttons.

View a single portfolio item →

If you don’t like the sidebar, just leave it empty and it won’t appear!

Customization options

As with all of our themes, we try to provide easy to use customization options that make your site feel just right. Portfolio is no different! You can:

• Select from 7 lovely fonts for your accent and body text.
• Choose a color for your links and other accents to match your logo or brand.
• Give your images a slick “fade in” effect when a page loads.
• Easily add handcrafted Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Flickr links to your footer.

It’s a blog, too!

Portfolio isn’t only about portfolio items. It wouldn’t be a complete WordPress theme without a lovely blog layout for your articles, images and status updates (asides).

View the blog page →

We’ve also included several typographic elements including special styling for in-content titles, pull quotes and alerts. We’ve added these elements to the editor so you can easily insert them in your content without mucking around with shortcodes or HTML.

Check it out

We’re very proud of our latest addition and we hope you’ll check out the demo site or watch the video tour to see what it can do. There are more details on the Portfolio theme page, but let us know if you have any questions or comments!

We should also give a very big thank you to Teagan White, whose (absolutely stunning) illustrations are being used on the demo site. Thanks, Teagan!

We’re extremely excited to announce Chalk; an innovative WordPress theme for the twenty-first century teacher. Chalk is crafted to bring the classroom environment online, and includes some exciting features to do just that: to-do lists, class conversations, podcasts and video lectures. Grab it today and start bringing your lessons to life in a dynamic and interactive surrounding.

Chalk features a beautiful responsive design, which means students have the flexibility to access class content on-the-go, from the convenience of their iPad, iPhone, or mobile device. This makes it easy for you to stay in touch with your students, wherever they might be.

To learn more about Chalk’s features and specifications, stop by the theme page. Also, don’t forget to check out the live demo and the video feature tour.

A huge thank you goes out to Rachael Baskerville for allowing us to use her amazing photographs on the demo site!

We’re extremely excited to announce our latest theme: Duet, a minimal, sophisticated WordPress theme tailored for writers, journalists, and business bloggers. We’ve worked hard to meticulously craft and refine Duet over the past three months, and we’re proud and excited with the result. Some of the features include: two-column layout (using CSS3), custom typography, custom color schemes, and a flexible featured slider.

We designed Duet using a mobile first approach; this responsive theme looks amazing in the browser and equally as awesome on your iPad, iPhone or other mobile device.

Be sure to check out the theme page, and demo video below to discover more about Duet’s exciting features, and the demo site for a live preview.

We would also like to give a huge shout-out to Agustin Sanchez for allowing us to use his awesome photographs on the demo site!

We’re proud to announce our latest production: Anthem, a beautiful responsive tumblog-style theme that features a stunning display of various types of media and a clean, minimal design. Anthem is designed to look great on all devices including phones, tablets, and regular displays.

Anthem was designed by Ryan Essmaker, and is geared towards artists, photographers and other creatives who need an elegant way to share their work.

Check out the Anthem theme page for more details and the demo site for a live preview.

Also, thank you to Agustin Sanchez for allowing us to use his beautiful photos on the demo site!

Video Tour

Say hello to React! React is a simple and elegant WordPress theme for business featuring a fluid and responsive grid that allows for easy viewing from an iPhone, iPad, or other mobile device. The theme is packed with some other great features: custom typography, custom background (hides automatically on small screens), support for projects, and more.

Check out the theme page for more details and the demo site for a live preview. Be sure to watch the quick video feature tour below to see some of the features in action.

I also want to give a huge thanks to David Lanham for allowing us to use his beautiful illustrations on our demo site and product pages. Thanks David!

Meet Linen, the newest member of our theme collection. Linen is a clean and flexible magazine style theme with some creative customization options. One of the coolest features is the option to completely control your typography. Linen uses select fonts from the Google Font Directory and gives you the choice to mix and match seven different accent fonts and eight different body fonts. Combine this feature with a custom background color or image and you have a truly unique and beautiful site.

I encourage you to check out the theme page for more details and the demo site for a live preview. Some of the many features include custom typography, custom background, featured slider, layout options, and much more. Check out this quick video feature tour to see some of the features in action.

Say hello to Shelf, the newest member of our theme collection! When we first broke ground on Shelf nearly four months ago I knew this theme was going to be special, but I never imagined it would turn out to be such a work of interface art. I want to personally thank the incredibly awesome Jon Hicks, Yan Sarazin, and Brandon Dove for bringing Shelf to life, it wouldn’t have happened without your hard work.

Shelf is now available for purchase on the WordPress and Tumblr platforms.

Handcrafted with love

As you know, every theme we release here at The Theme Foundry is handcrafted from scratch. We don’t follow the traditional route of handing off Photoshop mockups to third-party developers. Instead, we build the interface straight into HTML from sketches, creating necessary artwork and elements as we go. This approach takes some extra care and love, but makes for a higher quality finished product. This was especially true for Shelf, as we also had to incorporate custom JavaScript and WordPress functionality.

HTML5 goodness

At the core of Shelf is pure HTML5 goodness. If you take a peek at the source code you will find native HTML5 <header>, <nav>, and <article> tags. By combining @media queries and a fluid layout, Shelf also strives to be a flexible and responsive design.

Built for mobile

Shelf is built to play well with modern smartphones and even has some special tweaks for the iPad, including single finger swiping and easily scrollable articles! Not only that, Shelf for WordPress fully supports the Express iPhone app from WooThemes out of the box. If you are using the Tumblr version of Shelf, you have the ability to post using several different devices.

Upcoming WordPress post formats

As you may have heard, WordPress is introducing post formats in version 3.1 (due out sometime in December). The new post formats will be a perfect fit for Shelf and we plan on releasing an update soon after WordPress 3.1 is released giving you the option to migrate to the new native post formats.

What do you think?

We would love to hear any feedback you have on Shelf so please drop us a note in the comments!

Today I am excited to introduce our new theme, Photography! This is the first niche theme we have developed here at The Theme Foundry and I am extremely happy with how it turned out. This theme is geared towards professional photographers. The goal was to make it super easy for anyone to quickly setup a beautiful WordPress powered website, complete with a blog and a gallery/portfolio.

I encourage you to check out the theme page for more details and the demo site for a live preview. Some of the many features include seamless Flickr integration, custom galleries, gallery sorting, gallery options, and much more. Also be sure to check out this quick video feature tour.

Learn more about Traction →

I am super excited to announce the release of our newest WordPress theme, Traction! Traction is a dark and clean magazine style theme with a robust options menu and built in support for WordPress post thumbnails. This is the theme I meant to design when I started Punchcut late last year, it just wasn’t ready yet. Traction comes with a boatload of features, including three colors schemes (red, blue, green), built in Twitter support, and much more. I encourage you to browse through all the features and take it for a test drive. Be sure to let me know what you think in the comments.

New Pricing

As previously announced on Twitter we have rolled out new pricing for our themes. I have some great news if you were a PRO member as of yesterday. You have automatically been upgraded to a VIP PRO Membership! What does this mean? This means you get access to all of our current and future PRO themes, including Traction. Yes, you are that special. We aren’t even selling these VIP PRO Memberships right now, so you really should feel special.

New customers buying our themes shouldn’t feel left out. Your regular PRO Membership (free with any theme purchase) entitles you to 25% off all future theme purchases.

Theme Updates

We also released new versions of all our other themes today (Vigilance, Titan, and Punchcut). Here is a quick breakdown of the changes and fixes:

Vigilance

• Bug Fix: Added more specific ul.children selector to avoid extra spacing on nested lists inside entries .
• Bug Fix: Fixed PHP comments in the footer.
• Miscellaneous: Cleaned up the admin and added notation for PRO and non-pro features.

Titan

• Bug Fix: Added back the extra unordered list to avoid breaking the layout when you add widgets.
• Bug Fix: Correctly aligned the navigation menu dropdown
• Bug Fix: Added more specific ul.children selector to avoid extra spacing on nested lists inside entries.
• Bug Fix: Fixed PHP comments in the footer.
• Miscellaneous: Cleaned a bunch of cruft from the stylesheet.
• Miscellaneous: Cleaned up the admin and added notation for PRO and non-pro features.

Punchcut

• Bug Fix: Added missing language hook
• Bug Fix: Correctly aligned the navigation menu dropdown and fixed the weird persistent hover bug
• Bug Fix: Added more specific ul.children selector to avoid extra spacing on nested lists inside entries.
• Bug Fix: Fixed PHP comments in the footer.
• Miscellaneous: Cleaned up the admin and added notation for PRO and non-pro features.

Feedback Please

Please let me know what you think about the new theme and anything else in the comments.

Big news today. We just released a brand new theme, Punchcut, and are rockin’ some fresh new digs here at Themes by Jestro. Some of you how might have been following along on Twitter and know the launch was supposed to be yesterday, but mod_rewrite decided to take me 12 rounds as I was running the final checks before launch. Needless to say, I picked up some bruises but eventually came away with a knockout.

This marks an important point in our history for several reasons (which I will get to later). I encourage you to take a look around and please let me know what you think of the new setup. Don’t hesitate to post a note in the comments if you find any bugs while browsing around. Alright, let’s talk about Punchcut.

Say hello to Punchcut

I started out with an idea for a magazine theme and somehow Punchcut was born. Needless to say, it doesn’t look anything like a magazine theme, but it looks pretty damn good (at least I think so). There are several interesting points that came up while developing and designing Punchcut.

Typography

One of the important pieces I wanted to include with this new release was some really nice out of the box typography. There have been some explosive developments in the web font world lately so the goal was to take advantage of the trend and package some fonts with this theme.

This is easier said then done, 99% of fonts out there do not allow you to re-distribute them (especially under a different license like the GPL). I eventually stumbled upon two fantastic fonts, Chunk and Junction, both available under the SIL Open Font License (OFL) which allows for re-distribution under different compatible licenses. I started out with the gorgeous Museo Sans for the navigation and post headers, but the license doesn’t allow for distribution so Junction had to step in. On that note: I plan on releasing a tutorial for PRO members on substituting Museo Sans for Junction. Downloading and using Museo Sans is perfectly OK, I just can’t distribute it as part of a theme package.

Cufón to the rescue

Punchcut initially used the @font-face declaration to embed all the typography. This was great in the latest version of Firefox, but certain browsers (Internet Explorer) have trouble handling regular font files and require their own “special” file. This file requires the address of the site the font is being served on, which renders it pretty useless for a theme.

Correction (thanks to Bryce for reminding me in the comments): Internet Explorer EOT files do in fact work without requiring the website address, but the fonts simply looked terrible when I tested them in IE/Windows (especially with ClearType turned off) so I went with Cufón instead.

I had heard of Cufón before but and was anxious to give it a try. Cufón ended up working beautifully and now the fonts render perfectly in almost all browsers including the dreaded IE6.

Features

Punchcut comes bundled with all the features you have come to expect in our themes and some nice extras:

• Use your own logo (PRO members)
• Handcrafted social icons (RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Email)
• Professional and responsive support (PRO members)
• Custom navigation control
• Extra page templates (PRO members)
• Choose your background colors
• Sidebar image rotator
• Special “Alert Box” with a toggle switch in the theme options menu
• Built in Google Analytics support

I encourage you to head over to the download page and take Punchcut for a test drive. If you end up liking and using the theme I would encourage you to upgrade to PRO membership and get all of the features and unlimited support.