These days, a necessary tool of the trade for both professional and amateur visual artists, such as graphic designers, web developers, photographers, digital artists, etc., is an online presence; and that is usually achieved with a personal or professional portfolio site.
So today we are bringing you a selection of powerful, usable, free WordPress portfolio themes that are all highly customizable for experienced coders, but also just as usable as they are for non-coders.
Customizable and Free WordPress Portfolio Themes
Portfolium
Neat and flexible grid-based theme for WordPress, Portfolium can be used on portfolio websites or blogs. Take full advantage of Portfolium’s fresh, minimalistic design that is perfect as is, or as a foundation for your custom design.
Gridly
A free minimal and responsive portfolio theme ideal for graphic designers or photographers.
Polaroids
A Polaroid based theme ideal for both personal blogs and showcasing your portfolio. Minimalist, clean, light and fast to load.
Portfolio Press
Portfolio Press is a responsive theme for showcasing your photography, art, websites or other projects. An options panel is included for uploading logos and changing the layout. There is also support for the image gallery and quote post formats.
Chun
A responsive CSS3 and HTML5 blogging and portfolio theme. It supports all post formats and has layout, font and color options built into the theme customizer. The theme also supports the Custom Content Portfolio plugin, giving creative people the ability to share their work.
Satu
One-column elegant, beautiful and responsive personal WordPress theme.
Folder
This responsive theme is perfect for portfolios, product showcases and business blogs, and comes with custom work posts to display your projects. It is responsive with Lof and Flex slider. You have to ‘Pay with a Tweet’ to download this theme.
Panoramica
Panoramica is built with the intent of adapting to as many window sizes as possible. It has a fully fluid layout that gives it tremendous flexibility, allowing you to cater to both large and small screens alike. Its polished portfolio heavily emphasizes the use of images, displaying a clean slideshow in every portfolio item. You can customize its appearance through its extensive options panel.
Workality Lite
A fully responsive portfolio theme for creative people and agencies. A great way to display your portfolio through 4 different thumbnail size types and responsive layout.
Grid
Grid Theme Responsive is a WordPress theme with mobile responsive design, featuring infinite scroll. The free version is limited responsive with a premium version that is fully responsive.
Simply Delicious
Simply Delicious is a free minimalistic theme featuring big images, clean styles and easy browsing. A premium version of this theme is also available.
Rasputin
Rasputin is a portfolio/agency type WordPress theme. This is WordPress 3+ ready theme with features such as custom menu, featured images, widgetized sidebar and customizable call to action section. There is a jQuery slider on the custom homepage template and the theme comes with an option panel. Once installed, you will get a notification on the admin panel to install the required Options Framework plugin.
Illustrious
Illustrious is a clean and well-organized responsive theme, ideal for business or portfolio sites that want to showcase their services in a visual and striking way. It comes with a highly modified homepage, making use of custom post types to display your site’s main features. Illustrious can be easily customized to match your needs by tweaking its options panel.
Paragrams
Paragrams is a grid-based lightweight design with almost no images. Thanks to a number of custom advanced features, Paragrams is really easy to use for both you and your visitors.
Sharpfolio
Sharpfolio is a WordPress theme designed to enable web designers, graphic designers, photographers, motion designers, artists or any creative professionals to showcase their work in a simple, clean, beautiful portfolio.
Ultra Grid
Ultra Grid is a beautiful and modern WordPress theme with a grid-like design. Cross-browser compatible, this theme is perfect for any creative to showcase their portfolio.
Imbalance 2
Imbalance 2 turns your WordPress-based website into an attractive blog, portfolio or even online magazine. This free template is designed in a strict modern style with a minimalistic touch.
Minimal Design
This theme is perfect for any designer looking to create a unique portfolio showcase.
Pinboard
An elegant them powered by an advanced theme framework and grid system. With virtually unlimited layout options and styles, ideal for showcasing your portfolio of works or other multimedia elements like images, photo galleries, videos and podcasts.
Opulus
Opulus is a modern, highly customizable and responsive HTML5 and CSS3 WordPress theme that allows you to change the colors, frontpage layout, headers, page templates, fonts and much more. Take advantage of the portfolio custom post-type to showcase your gallery of work.
Preference Lite
Preference Lite is built on WordPress 3.5 while incorporating Twitter’s Bootstrap framework for adaptive responsive viewing in mobile devices from 480px to 1200px. Using HTML5 and CSS3, you get an amazing level of stylish features from a customized and enhanced WordPress Gallery, post formats that include aside, status, image and quote formats. Plus a special showcase header for sliders and images, 8 sidebar widget positions, custom page templates and more.
Screens
Blog and portfolio theme.
Hey Cookie
A simple, elegant grid-style theme for visual artists.
Showcase
Showcase is a theme designed and built to make building a portfolio easy for graphic designers, web developers and others with commercial or artistic work to display.
Stendhal
A corporate/portfolio theme that offers aesthetic harmony, usability, ease of use and flexibility.
Boldy
An image-driven theme including such features as custom menus, customizable slider, theme options panel and built-in contact form.
Demo | Free Sign-Up is required for Download
Briefcase
Briefcase is a portfolio based free WordPress theme that could be used for a lot of purposes, beginning with a portfolio and gallery site and finishing with a blog and magazine layout. Its minimalist design was specially created to catch the attention of everyone.
Grid Portfolio
A clean theme with a grid-style layout – perfect to showcase any portfolio. The free version is non-responsive, but a small fee will buy you the responsive version.
Xenon
Xenon is a portfolio theme designed to function as a showcase for creative works with minimal distraction from other elements. The theme has features such as featured menu, featured thumbnail, custom background, theme options, etc. The theme also comes with an option to customize its color scheme and link colors.
Axis
Axis is a fullscreen portfolio WordPress theme with features such as custom post types, custom taxonomies, custom menus, featured thumbnails, etc.
Conclusion
Hopefully you have enjoyed browsing these free portfolio themes, and even if you prefer to code your own themes from scratch or from a very basic theme, perhaps you have found this list to be a source of inspiration for your next project.
Have you used any of these themes as a base for your own portfolio or that of a client? Do you use free or premium themes for your work? Please share your links and opinions with us in the comments section below.