The snow has been taking its time here in the southern end of the Swedish mountain chain this winter, and in lieu of skiing and winter camping, I got around to building another free WordPress theme.
It’s called Spiekermann and is designed with blogs and portfolios in mind, but like most block themes, it can be used for pretty much anything. You can download it from WordPress.org, read more about its features here, or check out the demo.
The most eye-catching features in the theme are the asymmetrical grid on archive pages, and the offbeat typeface used for headings, Alpha Lyrae, which blends pixelated characters with sans-serif ones. Alpha Lyrae is prominently featured in the footer of the theme, where the site title is scaled up to fill the entire width of the screen. Spiekermann includes other type options if you don’t like your headings chunky, as well as ten different color schemes to choose from.
Spiekermann is named after German designer Erik Spiekermann, who in addition to designing FF Meta and writing Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works designed a print that’s been hanging in my office for the past couple of years. I’m a big fan of his.
That’s Spiekermann! I have some other theme designs in the pipeline as well, but I hope you won’t get to see any of them on the WordPress.org theme directory for a while. If you do, it will have been a very disappointing winter.
PS. I’ve deactivated my Twitter account. Long overdue. You can find me on Bluesky these days, although I likely won’t be very active there either.