1. Imbalance WordPress Theme

Imbalance WordPress Theme

This free WordPress theme features modern, clean aesthetics that puts your visual content in the forefront. It has a custom jQuery image gallery, a custom Twitter widget, and its own options page to manage and customize your WordPress portfolio site.

Demo

Download Page

2. Pure II Theme

Pure II Theme

This elegant and stylish free WordPress theme has a one-column layout and a design that uses web fonts for beautiful typography. It comes in three color schemes. The theme has a built-in slideshow and custom page templates for your portfolio page and site map page.

Demo

Download Page

3. Fullscreen

Fullscreen

With Fullscreen, your content will be front and center. This free WordPress theme is a one-column layout developed particularly for photographers, visual artists, and multimedia professionals. This theme has a built-in HD video player, a slick side-scrolling content area using jQuery, and embedding features for media web services such as YouTube and Google Video.

Demo

Download Page

4. Shaken Grid

Shaken Grid

Fitting for portfolio sites and image gallery, Shaken Grid is a free WordPress theme with features such a custom themes panel (for customizing the look-and-feel of your site) and a gallery layout that automatically self-adjusts depending on the dimensions of your images.

Demo

Download

5. BlueBubble WordPress Theme

BlueBubble WordPress Theme

A free WordPress theme for designers and photographers, BlueBubble boasts premium-like WordPress theme features such as a custom theme options panel and support for 8 different color schemes and styles. Note that this theme requires WordPress 3.0 or higher.

Demo

Download Page

6. Mansion WordPress Theme

Mansion WordPress Theme

Designed primarily for photobloggers, the Mansion WordPress Theme is nonetheless a wonderful option for presenting visual content. It uses a thumbnail grid that can contain screenshots of your latest projects that, when clicked, takes the interested user to another page that can have a brief description of the image.

Demo

Download Page

7. Fotofolio Landscape

Fotofolio Landscape

Specifically crafted for visual artists, photographers, and media designers, this free WordPress theme has multiple layouts and style options, a custom theme panel for managing your theme, and special page templates for client testimonials and image slideshows.

Demo

Download Page

8. AutoFocus+

AutoFocus+

The AutoFocus+ WordPress theme, while aimed primarily towards photographers, is a wonderful option for anybody working with visual media. The design is clean and laid out in a grid, flexibly working around your content. This is a child theme of Thematic, a popular WordPress theme framework.

Demo

Download Page

9. SimpleFolio

SimpleFolio

Exclusively released on Smashing Magazine, SimpleFolio is a clean and professional free WordPress theme intended for use on portfolio sites. It has custom page templates and the ability for you to give specific pages a full-width layout by hiding the right sidebar.

Demo

Download Page

10. Work-a-holic

Work-a-holic

Work-a-holic is a free minimalistic WordPress theme for showcasing the work of designers and digital artists. It has a two- or three-column page layout on a perfect grid and a sidebar widget that presents your most recent projects.

Demo

Download Page

Author:

Jacob Gube is the Co-Founder and Technical Editor of Design Instruct. He also runs the site called Six Revisions, another one of the team's websites. He's a web developer, designer, and author of books on web design and development. If you'd like to connect with him, check him out on Twitter: @sixrevisions or shoot him an email.