The Columnist

The Columnist is a quality responsive WordPress theme for personal and magazine-style blogs. Extremely customizable: you can separately set different layouts to homepage, archives, single pages, bbPress and BuddyPress. The theme includes responsive customisable slider (no plugins needed!) and five color themes (including completely custom colors). Content can be displayed in up to four-column layout. The theme also includes bbPress and BuddyPress styles. It is built with highest coding standards in mind and is regularly updated. Support is available on the creator’s website. This was a premium theme before but now all features are available for free.

Tarski

An elegant, flexible theme with built-in display options and alternate styles. Tarski includes support for aside-style posts, comes with numerous default header images, and translations are available for over 20 different languages. It is extremely customisable, both by the usual WordPress mechanisms such as custom headers, backgrounds and menus, but also by its support for custom CSS files and an extensive, well-documented API that gives child theme and plugin authors a huge amount of control without needing to modify the theme’s files, making upgrading to new versions simple.

Sunspot

A sharp theme with subtle grid lines and sun-splashed accents, Sunspot is a great all-purpose blogging canvas, especially for those who prefer a dark color scheme. Sunspot offers two arrangements for posts on the front page. Additional features include a custom header and a custom background, two optional widget areas, and a responsive layout that adapts gracefully to smaller screen sizes.

Sundance

A free video theme brought to you by the folks at Automattic. Despite its minimalist design, Sundance was crafted with clean, elegant typography and close attention to detail. The home page offers a featured video carousel. It supports the video post format, widgets, custom background, custom header, custom menus, and a custom link feature for your social media pages.