For some long time I've been gathering great blog designs from deviantart to get inspired and now I will showcase them all in one huge article!! Surprisingly finding great ideas and designs have been much easier in Deviantart than any other web design showcase sites.

I didn't add any comments this time – compare these designs yourself and try to understand why ones really stand out, well others seem a little bit classical. Notice small things, how designer puts a little bit unique style in its design to make emphasis like folding, comment,date boxes which stand out from layout, icons, background textures and nice shadings.

What  I noticed though – for blog designs light colors always look better and are more user-friendly since visitors need to read information – light background and dark text always seem to work great!

1. Wordpress Two by sinthux

WPmonk by sinthux

Wordpress by sinthux

Wordpress Beta by DouglasEltz

Hypowired by sinthux

Wordpress Theme by sALuUm

Webbo WordPress Thema by Servetinci

Simple Wordpress theme by yehsper

Edge v.1.1 by AlxDesign

Wordpress Blog by Pinpoint-Designs

FreshPress by AlxDesign

Plush by AlxDesign

Sveriges Finest by AlxDesign

Design MS v.5 by AlxDesign

Condo Bandit by AlxDesign

Disambler Wordpress by deadlinesdesign

s

Osae by osec

GrungePress by AlxDesign

PlanetF1 by AlxDesign

Springbloggers by SneakyOne1990

Wordpress Template 7

by

Tooschee

VintMint WordPress Theme by STRIF3wind

Jocoo by SencerBugrahan

Naruja Portfolio by JuliusX

Creative Bloggers by SneakyOne1990

Coffee Cup by Pilej

Delicate: WordPress Theme by itsmattadams

The General Blog by BboyWicked

IamSuthan by BboyWicked

Video BLOG – Template by askdzigner

Smooth Portfolio Layout by JuliusX

Webee by zee7

GoldPress by SencerBugrahan

Quacero by SencerBugrahan

Blog layout by shuffl3

Honcerate Wordpress theme by snaz

Black2 Wordpress theme-Blog by ehlikeyif

Blog Magazine Theme by dellustrations

Boutique Theme by dellustrations

Magazine Theme by dellustrations

Royal Mag by AlxDesign

Web-Kreation Redesign – Mockup by jeeremie

Gamma Design by easydisplayname

Beta Design by easydisplayname

Delta Design by easydisplayname

Authentic WP by gdnz

Coloured Solutions V1 Blog by moDesignz

Pixogen by gdnz

Simplicity by AlxDesign

AVG-HHBlog by AntoniaVG

CloudBlack WP by gdnz

DesignersLust Website Design by TheDrake92

Rainbow Blog by PanthereNoire92

Coffee blog by Pilej

Textured Blog Layout by voodoosimon

WordPress – Fairy Theme by detrans

Dalton Hurd by sinthux

Personal Portfolio 2.0 by jonaska

Blog Theme update by coWebdesign

WordPress – IcePress Theme by detrans

TV Shows by waterdesign

eacose by osec

osea by osec

AudioTech by DouglasEltz

Cube Productions by vanmall

Matias Blog by Pilej

KO by trunglq

CreativeTalk by kodcor3y

Big Blue by detruk

Green Palacy Theme by DouglasEltz

Waterfall blog by coloformia

As we have previously seen, Tumblr allows its uses to create custom themes giving the owner of a tumbleblog the ability to truly customise their tumbleblog to be their own. While tumblr coding is fairly easy to pick up compared to other more complex blogging systems, I want to give you an insight into the code and structure we are going to be deploying next time around when we set about converting a psd to tumblr.

Understanding the basics

Before we get stuck into the Tumblr code itself, you need to first know what a Tumblr theme looks like. Gone are the gazillion template files of other CMS’s; Tumblr uses one and only one. A single page of html, with the css and scripts in the head of the file is all you’ll need.

Now that you know how a theme looks, we are going to look at two simple concepts that make our single html page into a fully dynamic tumblr blog. These are variables and blocks.

Variables are exactly what the name suggests. A place-holder tag that our data is dynamically inserted into. They are used all across the theme in anything from titles to our dates. They use curly brackets and look like this :

Blocks on the other hand are a sort of step up from variables. They are used to display chunks of html and variables for different occurrences, e.g. for each different kind of Tumblr post. They can even be used conditionally to display stuff such as next and previous page links. Like variables, blocks use curly brackets, but are defined as a block, and open and close in a manner similar to html elements.

Put these blocks and variables to user together within html, and you will end up with a theme!

Html head

As always in Html, there are several pieces of information you are going to want to include within the head of your html document, and Tumblr does not let us down. It provides us with several variables that can be deployed with great ease.

{Title} – The html safe title of your blog

{Meta Description} – An html safe description of your blog for use within the meta tag

{Favicon} – A dynamically generated favicon url from your portrait photo

{RSS} – The url to the RSS feed of your tumbleblog

 <head> 	<title>{Title}</title> 	<link rel="shortcut icon" href="{Favicon}"> 	rss+xml" href="{RSS}"> 	<meta name="description" content="{MetaDescription}" /> </head> 

Basic Variables

Before we start displaying our posts and content, there are certain things we are going to want to display around our tumbleblog. Most of these are likely to appear in our header, such as our blog name, and logo / photo. Here are some of the variables that make this possible.

{Title} – The html safe title of your blog

{Description} – The description of your blog which may include html

{PortraitURL-64} - The url to your portrait picture. Different sizes are available (16, 24, 30, 40, 48, 64, 96, 128)

 <div id="header"> 	<h1>{Title}</h1> 	<p>{Description}</p> 	<img alt="{Title}" src="{PortraitURL-64}" /> </div> 

Display Posts

Now that we have set up the easy stuff with some basic variables, it’s time to get stuck into the more dynamic posts which are rendered with the help of both blocks and variables. The posts block is placed in the area that all our different types of posts will be displayed.

Within our posts block, we can start to branch out into our many different kinds of posts. Each of these are shown below.

{block:Text}{/block:Text} – Displays Text posts

{block:Photo}{/block:Photo} – Displays Photo posts

{block:Photoset}{/block:Photoset} – Displays Photoset posts

{block:Quote}{/block:Quote} – Displays Quote posts

{block:Link}{/block:Link} - Displays Link posts

{block:Chat}{/block:Chat} – Displays Chat posts

{block:Audio}{/block:Audio} – Displays Audio posts

{block:Video}{/block:Video} – Displays Video posts

{block:Answer}{/block:Answer} – Displays answer posts

Each different type of post has several different types of variables and further blocks that are relevant only to that type of post, but there are several variables that are likely to be used in ever post such as the link, and tags.

{Permalink} – The exact url for a single post

{ShortURL} – The sharing friendly short url for a single post

{PostID} – The unique numeric post ID for a single post

 {block:Posts} ... 	{block:Text} 	<div> 		{block:Title} 		<h2><a href="{Permalink}">{Title}</a></h2> 		{/block:Title} 		<div> 		{Body} 		</div> 	</div> 	{/block:Text} ... {/block:Posts} 

Moving down into each specific post type itself, variables and blocks become far more specific to the post type. I won’t go into any of them as there’s a lot of them to remember, but if you feel you want to take a look at the them now, then here’s where to learn more.

• Text posts
• Photo posts
• Photoset posts
• Quote posts
• Link posts
• Chat posts
• Audio posts
• Video posts
• Answer posts

Next / Previous Links

The other majorly important feature you are going to want to include is pagination for your posts and pages; in both cases Next and Previous links, and lo-and-behold, Tumblr caters for both with variables and blocks.

An initial block is used to conditionally display the full pagination html, with two further conditional blocks to conditionally display each Previous and Next link. Finally, two variables are used to display the relevant destination url.

Single posts have different blocks and variables for pagination than those for pages, so here they are.

For pages, these are the blocks and variables used for pagination.

{block:Pagination}{/block:Pagination} – Only displays if there are previous / next pages to link to

{block:PreviousPage}{/block:PreviousPage} – Only displays if there is a previous page

{block:NextPage}{/block:NextPage} – Only displays if there is a next page

{PreviousPage} - Url for the previous page

{NextPage} – Url for the next page

 {block:Pagination} <ul> 	{block:PreviousPage} 	<li> 		<a href="{<span class=">PreviousPage</a><a href="{<span class=">}">Previous</a> 	</li> 	{/block:PreviousPage} 	{block:NextPage} 	<li> 		<a href="{<span class=">NextPage</a><a href="{<span class=">}">Next</a> 	</li> 	{/block:NextPage} </ul> {/block:Pagination} 

Similarly, for posts, these are the relevant blocks and variables.

{block:PermalinkPagination}{/block:PermalinkPagination} – Only displays if there are previous / next posts

{block:PreviousPost}{/block:PreviousPost} – Only displays if there is a previous post

{block:NextPost}{/block:NextPost} – Only displays if there is a next post

{PreviousPost} - Url for the previous post

{NextPost} – Url for the next post

 {block:PermalinkPagination} <ul> 	{block:PreviousPost} 	<li> 		<a href="{<span class=">PreviousPost</a><a href="{<span class=">}">Previous</a> 	</li> 	{/block:PreviousPost} 	{block:NextPost} 	<li> 		<a href="{<span class=">NextPost</a><a href="{<span class=">}">Next</a> 	</li> 	{/block:NextPost} </ul> {/block:PermalinkPagination} 

Further Reading

There are several further features that you may want to add into your theme, and as usual Tumblr caters for many of them. However, I simply wanted to go over the basics here, and not flood you with unnecessary information while learning. If you do want to continue reading, take a look at the official Tumblr documentation for these features listed below.

• Dates
• Notes
• Tags
• Group Blogs
• Day Pages
• Search
• Following
• Likes

What’s up Next?

Next up is a tutorial that will teach you how to take a psd design of a tumbleblog, and turn it into a fully fledged Tumblr theme. Keep your eyes open for that, but for now, here’s a sneak peek at what we’ll be creating!