A minimal design will help your content get more attention. There are too many beautiful but minimal themes in tumblr theme garden. Here are 10 of my personal favourites, in no particular order. Click on the image to preview or install.
Atonement v2.0
Simplification
Brutal Simplicity
Easy Reader 2
Nostalgia
Simple Things
The Minimalist
Litewire
NightNight
If I missed any beautiful themes that you know, drop a line below. 
Those who are considered experts of everything related to user-interface, are not always very supportive of the importance of visual aesthetics in blog customization so as to enrich the UX. On the other hand, designers are very much aware of the importance of visual aesthetics and they want to exploit their designing skills to yield measurable success from blog customization. This creates a clash of opinions between UX specialists and designers.
If you think it over yourself, you will realize that designers aren’t really wrong. After all, who doesn’t like some beautiful graphics and animation? As long as you do not overdo it, you can very well augment your blog’s visual aesthetics. In fact, studies on web UX have shown that a considerable percentage of users are influenced by aesthetics, creativity and beauty. These users have been able to put more trust in websites with these visual aesthetics.
Visual aesthetical appeal does not only improve the user experience but also maintains a balance between the practical aspects and the beauty. It’s simple. When you please the eye, you automatically please the brain.
In order to understand the how visual aesthetics work in customized web development for your blog, you need to first understand the way the brain absorbs visuals and responds to them. It is a highly complex process and it takes only an instant for the brain to process an image and respond to it. Studies show that visitors evaluate the visual aesthetical appeal of a website within 50 milliseconds. Needless to say, this evaluation impacts the visitors’ opinion about the website.
In other words, visitors have formed positive opinions about a site’s credibility after seeing the aesthetic appeal of it. Sophisticated aesthetics not only influence visitors but also enhances the usability of a website. The same thing applies to your blog customization.
There is something called “ affective responses” in the study of psychology. These responses trigger in an unconscious manner by the brain’s lower centers. The funny thing is, these centers also trigger the natural instincts such as hunger, fear etc. Consider these responses as the core reactions to what you see. Now think about users’ experience when they see your blog customization, with visual aesthetics.
In this article, you have found out how visually appealing things are more powerful. Keep it in mind when you take up the web development for your your weblog. All the best.
This is a guest post by Jayati Bhattacharjee. Jayati is a web developer and technical author and is associated with Quality Web Programming which is one of the leading web development company in India . She has authored quality content on various websites on web programming. You can contact Quality Web Programming on Twitter and Facebook.
A child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme. Child themes are created to modify an existing theme, called the parent theme, thus making the theme development easier. By modifying the style sheet alone, you can make a theme that in no way resembles the parent. In this post, I’m talking about 6 wordpress themes you can use to build child themes of. All of them are free! ( any theme can be used as parent, though these are recommended)
The new default theme in WordPress. As all the (updated) wordpress installations have this theme, only the child theme you create need to be installed. This blog uses a child of Twenty Eleven.
Roots theme is based on HTML5 Boilerplate and Bootstrap from Twitter. A clean theme with a twitter-like navbar, thanks to the bootstrap.
Yoko is a 3 column responsive theme. Comes with a custom social links widget and supports multiple post types, gallery, image, video, aside, link or quotes (supported by Twenty Eleven and many others too)
Reverie is a blank, responsive starter theme for wordpress powered by Foundation and HTML5 Boilerplate.
A responsive mobile-friendly theme from Simple Themes.
Thematic is a highly extensible search engine optimized theme framework for wordpress. A hot favorite of many developers.
Do you know a great theme that I missed? Drop a comment.
Instablogg lets you to create blog posts instantly, without signing up or setting up a blog. At the homepage, you are greeted with a WYSIWYG editor. They don’t even ask for your name. You can start writing right away.
Once you create a post, you’ll get a unique (and too long) URL, so that the post can be edited later. Anyone with that URL can edit your post and if you lose it, there’s no way you can gain back access. The blog post you create is accessible at a randomly generated URL, which cannot be customized. All the recently updated public posts are listed here.
The simple blog design includes share buttons, an option to translate the blog post (Google Translate), a QR code for the page, and disqus powered comment box.
The service is good enough if you want to tell the world something anonymously. If what you need is a blog that’s simple and easy to maintain, there’s tumblr.
I’ve always been a fan of minimalism but most of the WordPress theme developers around aren’t so, it seems. The result – I couldn’t find a theme that’s pleasing. I could have solved this by creating a theme from scratch. But WordPress theming isn’t an easy job. It takes too much time and patience. Someone as lazy as me couldn’t even think of doing it. So, I turned towards the best option (considering it’s my only option), modify an existing theme. The theme I chose to modify was ‘Twenty Eleven’, the new default theme in wordpress. It already looks great so that too much modification wasn’t needed. The problem with Twenty Eleven is that, it doesn’t have a sidebar in post view and page view. I googled for a solution and managed to solve it in no time. The end product: The new theme of this blog.
How you can modify a theme?
There are two methods you can choose from. You can simply edit the theme files. But that isn’t easy and not recommended as you may find it hard to navigate through the code. Twenty Eleven’s style sheet alone contains 2670 lines.
The other method is to create a child theme. According to the WordPress Codex, “A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme, and allows you to modify, or add to, the functionality of that parent theme.”
A handful of posts on wordpress child theming are already available. So, it’s pointless to write another version. Below are some well written articles to help you get started.
Enchantress and Blanc are two single column tumblr themes I made keeping minimalism in mind. Setting up Google Analytics and Disqus comments are as easy as sipping a cup of coffee. Click “Customize appearance”, Paste the Google Analytics code and Disqus shortname into respective fields (found under appearance) and click “Save Changes“.
See the screenshots of the themes below.
Blanc
Preview and Download Enchantress