50+ Beautifully Designed Free Themes and Widgets to Enhance your Tumblr Experience
- By Aquil Akhter
- Posted in Freebie
- 15 comments
Tumblr is getting popular day after day because of its flexibility, power and simplicity. Tumblr is a blogging platform through which you can share your content, images and videos with the world even when you are on the go. This is because it empowers bloggers to post and customize their content from a web browser, email or phone.
This post contains some beautiful free themes that will let you enhance your Tumblr experience. This post features not only themes but also some over-the-top Tumblr widgets and Apps to manage your Tumblr account with ease.
Free Tumblr Themes
Adaptation ( Demo | Download )
An attention grabbing theme with a blood red background that makes it hard to divert your eyes from:
Be Original ( Demo | Download )
A neat and simple Tumblr theme that embodies originality of your ideas:
The Fisherman’s Friend ( Demo | Download )
Innovative and out of the ordinary. I adore the imaginative show and color palette used in this theme:
Clean Read ( Demo | Download )
A minimalism based theme mainly focuses on typographic elements:
(More) Important Things ( Demo | Download )
This is probably the liveliest and most sparkling theme in the collection:
Paper Walls ( Demo | Download )
This theme is made of recyclable materials from top to bottom. Simple and effective:
Plaid ( Demo | Download )
An interesting pattern of mosaic with black and purple color is enough to attract visitors and get them to stick to your blog:
Field Notes ( Demo | Download )
A dark colored theme with plain background and simple layout to attract your readers towards your blog posts:
Redux ( Demo | Download )
A nicely colored, simple and attractive theme that can set your Tumblr blog apart from others:
Fluid ( Demo | Download )
This is perhaps the most tempting theme in the gallery with a beautifully colored and shiny layout:
One Very Important Thought ( Demo | Download )
Although dark, this theme is certainly very powerful in engaging visitors and readers interest:
101 ( Demo | Download )
A colorful and visually alluring theme to spice up your Tumblr blog:
Organ ( Demo | Download )
Another dark background theme with some attention grabbing graphics:
Letterpress ( Demo | Download )
A simple and neat theme with grey background that gives a very professional look:
Headline Tumblr Theme ( Demo | Download )
Make your blog appear as a big corporate website with this professionally designed theme:
Rio Theme ( Demo | Download )
A fresh and funky Tumblr template, narrow tumblog-styled design:
Modern1 ( Demo | Download )
An elegant and contemporary theme that certainly sanctifies your blog with the rest in the industry:
Vintage Stripes ( Demo | Download )
A beautiful theme based on retro styles to give your Tumblr blog a vintage look:
Pink touch 2 ( Demo | Download )
A simply minimalist theme focusing on the content of your post. A perfect choice for the perfectionists:
Chunky ( Demo | Download )
Make your content appear in chunks so as to better accommodate content, audios, videos, images, etc.:
Natural Elegance ( Demo | Download )
Demonstrate the simplicity and sophistication of the color black through this beautiful Natural Elegance theme:
Easy Reader 2 ( Demo | Download )
This theme lives up to its name. This is a nice and easy to read theme that comes with a beautiful contrasted heavy header:
Mac Envy ( Demo | Download )
Mac Envy is one of the first freely available Tumblr themes, and a perfect Tumblr theme for Mac fanatics:
Silo ( Demo | Download )
The photographic background of this theme, along with the cool and stylish grid layout is enough to attract visitors towards your blog:
for.screen ( Demo | Download )
This is one of the most beautiful dark themes in this compilation with some harsh shadows and big icons:
Penguin Classics Recycled ( Demo | Download )
A beautiful old styled design is being recycled and given a very contemporary look:
Transparent Theme ( Demo | Download )
This theme comes with a soft background coupled with pleasing and nice transparent frames:
PhotoBoard ( Demo | Download )
PhotoBoard is a grid layout theme that simply embodies a bulletin board look:
Futura ( Demo | Download )
The most popular and highly anticipated theme from IKEA to House MD has finally reached Tumblr:
Dark Paper ( Demo | Download )
You will find some beautiful letterpress effects on the frames along with a dark background:
Dream Theme ( Demo | Download )
The compulsory flower-patterned burst theme. Beautifully well done:
Wood Revisited ( Demo | Download )
A nice, simple and eye-catching background, although this theme could use some refinements overall:
Strange Little Town ( Demo | Download )
A sparkling theme with shiny stars at the top and a spooky town at the bottom:
Coffee Shop ( Demo | Download )
A peaceful and affectionate theme that features an inspired coffee cup design with whimsical froth:
iBlack ( Demo | Download )
This is an iPhone like theme that features rounded date icons and a rich background:
Funkytional Sezeen ( Demo | Download )
Another simple and attractive theme with a light colored background and beautiful typography:
Dainty Fresh ( Demo | Download )
A floral based and very invigorating theme having beautiful flowers in the background:
Revista ( Demo | Download )
This is a customizable theme so that you can change font, color, background and even images. All four columns are displayed in the form of grids and are extremely easy to work with:
Tumblr Widgets and Apps
Tumbltape
Tumbltape is a widget that easily turns any Tumblr blog into a play-list. It is created with the latest songs on a user’s tumblelog, and the play-list is updated automatically as new songs are uploaded:
Hellotxt
With Hellotxt, you can easily post text, audio, video and photo updates to Tumblr. This update can even be done by way of email, SMS, IM, WAP browser or third-party applications:
Tumblr Tag Clouds
This is a tag cloud generator for Tumblr. It uses the Tumblr API’s JSON output and jQuery to generate a tag cloud each time your site is accessed:
Twitter for tumblr
Twitter widget for tumblr allows your stream to show up on your tumblog:
Comeks
Create & share funny Comeks messages online or in mobile. Combine your photos with speech bubbles and add-on stickers. Share in: Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and more:
Tumblweed
This widget is designed as a desktop client that lets you view posts and create new ones right from your desktop. Tumblweed works perfectly well on Windows and Mac, and it also allows photo posts from webcams, clipboards, or drag-and-dropping:
Rotzy
Rotzy lets you share and broadcast your iPhone photos to Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. You can easily take and share life’s events with your iPhone:
TumblePhone
This widget allows you to view an iPhone optimized web layout for any Tumblr username:
Tumbleeze
This is a free Adobe air application that lets you drag and drop your videos, audios, and images directly to your tumblog:
Tumblr widget
Makes posting easy and fun. Make regular posts with HTML formatting and spellchecking. Your username and password are saved in between sessions making posting to your tumblr account quick and easy:
Post To Tumblr
Post To Tumblr is a simple extension that adds easy right-click-post functionality to Chrome:
Tumblr Dashboard
Access your tumblelog and create new content right from your Chrome toolbar:
Streampad – Tumblr MP3 Player
If you like listening to music on Tumblogs, you may be interested in this project. Play all the music from everyone you follow on Tumblr:
Psolenoid
Psolenoid lets you link your Tumblr posts to other related posts on other blogs. In this way, it provides reciprocal link exchange that ultimately brings in a new set of visitors to your blogs:
tarpipe
Automate publishing and sharing of your tumblogs with this web app to 22 other blogging and social networking platforms at the same time. With tarpipe, you can publish your content by emails, IM’s and other apps:
TumblrStats
TumblrStats provides comprehensive information about your tumblog including stats on the number of posts, rate and type of posts, time since last post, etc. All the information is provided in a neatly designed page:
Tumblr Post
It is a Firefox addon that helps you posting updates, quotes, photos, videos and audios to your Tumblr with a simple drag and drop function. With this addon installed in Firefox, you will no longer be required to save videos and photos to your desktop prior to posting them to your Tumblog:
(rb)
About the Author
Aquil Akhter is a web graphic designer and has been working in this field for 8 years. He also runs the blog webdesigncore.com, which focuses on free web resources and inspiration for designers and developers.
Flexa, 14 April 2011
Cool themes
Angel Jasica, 14 April 2011
This is a really great collection — beautiful themes!
Nice Work :-)
Filipe Valente, 14 April 2011
Nice, but is there really that many people that use tumbrl?!
Robert Bowen, 14 April 2011
Actually, Filipe, Tumblr has around 10 million users currently and continues to grow in popularity. While it is not as large a user base as say WP, it still is a pretty good mass o’ folks. :)
Rubelle, 14 April 2011
Great choice!
Let me add that as a Tumblr user, I’ve noticed that it’s most often used as a substitute for Twitter (obviously more advanced because it allows posting photos and embedding videos) and it’s not that popular among old school bloggers who prefer the written word.
Robert Bowen, 14 April 2011
Thanks for the follow up Rubelle. As another user of Tumblr I have to agree that it is very much a combination platform somewhere between blogging and social media. I also think there is a large draw for your average client or user who does not need the complex functionality of more developed and involved platforms, like WordPress.
Brittany Rubinstein, 14 April 2011
That’s a good way of putting it. I’ve tried using Tumblr, but wasn’t too crazy about because I couldn’t quite figure out what I could use it for. Might have to give it another shot one of these days.
I must have missed some of these themes because all the one’s I tried weren’t too great. These are nice though.
scott, 16 April 2011
I see you didnt have this theme
http://www.tumblr.com/theme/7285/
I think its great (& free)
Adriano, 20 April 2011
Loved the article. Bookmarked :D
inspirationfeed, 27 April 2011
Wonderful tools! I really enjoyed the tools and widgets you provided, especially the tag cloud code.
nizbytes, 07 June 2011
awesome!!!
Pali Madra, 22 July 2011
Nice post.
I wonder if there is a provision to download these themes. Right now the download theme takes you to the theme installation page on tumblr.
I wanted to customize the themes to make my own unique themes.
Gregory C., 16 September 2011
Pali,
You can edit the theme’s code right on Tumblr’s page for now, so you could copy the code right from your own site if you wanted to edit it.
I do agree though it would be nice to be able to download all of the theme’s content from Tumblr, but it seems they want most of their themes hosted on the site for now…
Phoenix, 12 May 2012
Who selected these? Most of these are ugly and over-”designed”. There’s a whole stack of truly elegant and sophisticated themes out there..
Ramandeep, 21 February 2013
Amazing collection, but as per me no cool tumblr themes are available for free, every blogger who spend so hours on tumblr, should spare bucks on buying a professional tumblr theme