17+ Best WordPress Portfolio Themes for Illustrators
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No matter if you are a seasoned artistic professional or a hobbyist, WordPress offers you a fantastic opportunity to create your own creative portfolio website offering a huge set of the best portfolio WordPress themes for illustrators and designers of all calibers. And what’s really important, you can create your own website even with minimum efforts and a tiny budget.
If you are a newbie, of course, you’ll unlikely learn WordPress in a day. But you don’t actually need to learn it deeply, getting familiar with the interface will do.
Moreover, as an artist, you definitely don’t want to split your time into creating and website management. The latter should be minimized to uploading your works and writing posts. So, we’ll try to present you with a handpicked collection of premium & free portfolio WordPress themes that you can start a smooth sailing from. These themes won’t eat up your time on setup and, of course, will help you set yourself out of the pack.
How To Choose a Creative Portfolio WordPress Theme?
We also want to give you an idea what criteria we have in mind when choosing portfolio themes WordPress. So you can actually understand whether they correspond with your needs:
- A portfolio theme that is able to cover a diversity of needs of creatives: children’s book illustrations, urban sketchers, graphic designers, painters, architectural illustrators and different art organizations
- Different demos in one theme solutions and minimalist layout themes
- A special focus on performance (many “creative” themes are bloated with lots of unneeded features, so we are trying to avoid poorly optimized themes)
- Regularly updated themes
- A trusted solution with good customer reviews
- Integrated ecommerce functionality to help you sell arts
- Plenty of customization options and essential pre-made widgets.
Looking for other best portfolio themes WordPress solutions? Click to view our next posts:
- Best WordPress Themes for Portfolio – Free and Premium
- 10+ WordPress WooCommerce Themes for Creatives
- Best WordPress Artist Portfolio Themes 2021
- Best WordPress Photography Portfolio Themes 2021
If you plan to create a portfolio with a store, watch this WooCommerce step-by-step guide:
Discover the Best Portfolio WordPress Themes for Illustrators
So, let’s see our compilation of 17+ responsive portfolio WordPress themes that let you showcase how you bring out your own unique vision of life into art.
Creatista WordPress Portfolio Theme for Illustrators
Creatista is not only a minimalist WordPress theme for illustrators but an excellent option for the category of WordPress video portfolio themes. You can easily assess it if you take a look at the demo – it features the real works of the graphic designer or videographer. Thanks to different layouts, Creatista gives you lots of space for featuring works of different sizes: product design, illustrations, a detailed graphic novel, character design projects, and more.
If you need a true sense of uncluttered design, the minimalism of the Creatista illustration WordPress theme is perfect for giving all the limelight to your works. With this theme, you can easily categorize your works and display them in a needed number of columns with Jetpack plugin. It’s also packaged with a WooCommerce shop design, so you can sell arts easily if you set up the WooCommerce plugin.
Illustrator WordPress Portfolio Theme for Illustrators
If you love experiments and can’t stay long with just one portfolio design, Illustrator theme will help you with your dreams and needs: it offers numerous designs with both balanced and non-standard focus, multipurpose layout alternatives, professionally crafted footers, and headers, etc.
In a word, it provides you with all the array of technical things that will provide you with a safe environment for simply showcasing your works. It’s integrated with WooCommerce, WPML, Contact Form 7 and dozens of custom crafted shortcodes for bringing more authenticity to your creative portfolio. It”s a perfect WordPress illustration portfolio.
Margo WordPress Theme for Designers
Margo is a very simple and minimal creative portfolio theme for illustrators and product designers. It’s very neat, elegant and is not overloaded with tons of useless features. Basically, it comes with 3 portfolio layouts, 3 blog layouts, and 8 custom page templates. A happy medium, isn’t it?
Another pleasant bonus is a 1-click demo data installation option that will let you figure out how to start much quicker and easier. If you want to start showcasing your works today or tomorrow, Margo is a decent choice among responsive WordPress portfolio themes.
Discovery WordPress Theme for Design Agencies
Discovery is not a normal portfolio WordPress theme, it’s much more suitable for creative agencies aiming to showcase services, agency features, a team and other traditional business website elements. It’s also your thing if you are looking for a trendy-looking website with a good dose of animation (but bear in mind that too much animation may have a bad effect on the website performance).
XiPortfolio Free WordPress Portfolio Theme for Artists
XiPortfolio is one of the free simple WordPress portfolio themes for creatives with a focus on your images and minimized navigation. A free version offers a grid layout only, so if you are on a tiny budget, this may be a good option for a basic demo portfolio. To get access to color options, more portfolio layouts and color scheme tweaks, you’ll need to get a Pro version.
Artwork Lite Free Art WordPress Theme
Artwork Lite is a free art WordPress theme suitable for both a personal portfolio and an art gallery website. The best thing about Artwork Lite is that unlike many other free portfolio themes for WordPress, it’s not that strictly limited in functionality and design. It gives you dozens of great customization tools (like color and font customization, several layouts, branding customization, menu alternatives, etc.) for free.
If you are looking for a perfect combo of a classic look and concept in WordPress art portfolio themes, you won’t find a better solution than Artwork.
Luisa Conceptual WordPress Portfolio Theme
Luisa is another one of cool portfolio wordpress themes with truly creative design decisions. It comes with a sweet fonts/gallery layout/navigation menu balance, providing a unique creative environment. Individual projects come with very neat and useful layouts for putting your works and accompanying them with texts. Overall, Luisa can perfectly serve the needs of graphic designers and portrait illustrators.
Visionary Creative Multipurpose WordPress Theme
Visionary is a multipurpose WordPress theme for a diversity of creative needs: it offers many layouts (Masonry, grid, list, tiles, etc.) to showcase your works in different ways. Apart from layout flexibility, the theme is monetization-oriented: you can include stylish pricing pages to offer different packages of services and sell arts individually via an integrated WooCommerce plugin.
Moreover, Visionary includes several premium plugins by default helping you build stylish slideshows with Slider Revolution plugin and create any simple or complex website page with a page builder plugin. All in all, if you are looking for something more than just to demo your creative works, Visionary definitely worth taking a look at.
Arte Art Gallery WordPress Theme
Arte is a soft and clean WordPress theme for art galleries, painters, illustrators, and anyone aiming to share their creativity with the world. If you need to post lots of extra blogs in addition to a creative portfolio showcase, the theme will be a perfect solution for it.
It comes with a beautiful blog layout, awesome galleries for posting upcoming exhibitions, stylish event layouts and more. Of course, Arte is the best choice for art bloggers and art news websites.
Gutenix WordPress Theme
Gutenix is a Gutenberg optimized WordPress theme that comes with a bunch of different demos for starting a dedicated WordPress website. Among the variety of ready-made websites, you will definitely find a theme to be a starter for a splendid portfolio page.
Gutenix is a very fast-loading and lightweight theme with advanced style and blog settings on top. You can choose whatever posts layout you want from listing, grid, masonry, or justify and either will look perfectly. The theme lets you customize the header with styles, or choose one of the premade header layouts. You get all this and more within a single freemium template!
Clean Portfolio Free WordPress Theme
Clean Portfolio name speaks for itself – the theme offers a stunning minimal look and feel to give all the focus to your works. It’s also quite wide and bold, so it’s really gorgeous and functional at the same time (readable fonts, complementary colors, lots of what space).
One extra stunning thing about this theme is a Medium-like blog that gives you an opportunity to create a story and conversation around your works. You may also notice that this theme comes with a huge hero header to help you make your personal brand more memorable. Clean Portfolio theme comes with social media integration and testimonials functionality out of the box. Oh, and have I mentioned that all this is free of charge?
Art. Creative WordPress Portfolio Theme
That’s a perfect theme for showcasing your works and keeping their authenticity – you can display panoramic and vertical images, graphic novels, product design charts, book illustrations, and more. Art. gives you full freedom and flexibility for this. Also, this WordPress portfolio theme comes with the integrated e-shop functionality and a drag-and-drop WordPress builder to help you construct professionally-looking pages and posts without coding.
Awa WordPress Theme for Illustrators and Design Agencies
Out of many WordPress design portfolio themes, Awa is a bright and positive WordPress portfolio theme for creative studios and solo illustrators. It comes with a huge amount of pre-made demos, header and menu styles, blog layouts, etc, so you may feel like you are spoiled for choice.
All essential tools for creating an art shop are also integrated via WooCommerce plugin (with several shop layout alternatives!). This theme will definitely help you unleash your creativity and build and outstanding portfolio of your dream.
Nifty Fifty WordPress Portfolio Theme for Photographers and Designers
Nifty Fifty is by default a theme for photographers, but it can be easily transformed into a designer or illustrator’s portfolio thanks to flexible layouts. It can be a great off-shelf solution: very lightweight and mobile-friendly portfolio galleries, WooCommerce shop, password-protected galleries, black and white color skins, and lots of website management and optimization tools with the integrated Jetpack plugin.
No crazy bells and whistles, Nifty Fifty is perfect for a minimalist WordPress creative portfolio.
Metis Universal WordPress Portfolio Theme
Metis features a universal design for the needs of creatives. With the several pre-made layouts, you have a good choice of how to organize your works on a page – in a full-width preview mode, in a classic grid, in a lightbox gallery or the like.
On the customization level, it comes with light and dark skins, 2 menu types, several filterable portfolio types, different fonts, a bunch of icons and more. The theme is quite fast loading and slick, so if it looks like a tasty thing from a visual perspective for you, have no worries, it will perform great on any modern gizmo.
GridStack Creative Agency WordPress Theme
GridStack is an awesome, modern WordPress portfolio theme for corporate and personal needs. Thanks to a variety of pre-made layouts and shortcodes, your creative portfolio can take any needed shape depending on the kind of your works.
The colors and fonts in this theme can be also tweaked. GridStack is quite a fast theme, without extra bloat, so it should be perfect for showcasing any number of quality works.
Galleria Metropolia Art Museum & Exhibition Gallery Theme
A great theme for active artists, who not only share a portfolio of arts but also arrange and manage various art workshops and seminars. This illustration WordPress theme gives a lot of space for sharing your experience of different art events on a trendy blog.
The theme is great for featuring your portfolios in trendy layouts and even selling art. The theme is packed with a really impressive customization toolset, so you’ll have a chance to show your creativity even in adjusting your own website.
Final Word On Best WordPress Portfolio Themes (Free or Premium)
Thanks for sticking around and don’t forget to share your experience with any of these beautiful themes!
Disclosure: this WordPress creative portfolio theme listing contains external affiliate links and we may be paid commission if you buy products featured above. The thoughts on this page are our own and have not been based on the payment.
Very nice compilation of themes. Thanks for your great research.
Probit is also a pretty good option to design your portfolio related WP website. This theme is free that has bristled with pixel perfect design, custom page templates, 3 different blog templates and lots of other great features. To know more visit
Thanks for the suggestion, but the recommended theme is rather business / multipurpose.