Visual Theme

Visual is a free theme designed to showcase photography, artwork and images in a neat masonry grid layout.

Standard Features

  • Masonry layout: Regardless of the featured image height and width (or even if no image is selected) the posts will look great in a nice dynamic grid.
  • Responsive Layout: Visual looks great on small screens, such as tablets and smartphones, as well as on laptops and desktops.
  • Typography: Uses Raleway, a beautiful webfont by Matt McInerney and served by Google Fonts
  • Icon Font: Pixel dense retina displays look great with this theme because of the icon gylphs from Entypo, by Daniel Bruce.
  • Solid code: Visual is built off of the Underscores starter theme and uses WordPress best practices.

Premium Features

If you’d like additional font options, color palettes, infinite scroll, or lightboxes- see Visual+. Purchases also help support the work that goes into the free version.

How to Use the Theme

  • Download the theme and activate
  • Set your menu in WordPress (under “Appearance” > “Menus”)
  • If images don’t show up by default, you may need to set the featured image. Edit your post and click “Set featured image”.
  • If you are making changes to the CSS or template files, consider using a child theme. You can download this one to start with.

If you’d like to display excerpts on the home page rather than full text, you can either use the more button or select the “excerpt” option in the theme customizer.

WordPress.com Users

A version of Visual has been built for WordPress.com. You can get it for free here. If you’re using Visual on WordPress.com you won’t be able to alter the template code or use third-party plugins, but you can still make some css changes with custom design upgrade. If you need support for Visual on WordPress.com, you’ll need to contact their support team as they run a slightly customized version of the theme.

Theme Demo

View the Demo

Get the Theme

Download from WordPress.org

Upgrade

For additional options, features, and support, check out Visual+. Purchases help to support both the free and paid versions. Read more.

About Devin

I am a developer based in Austin, Texas. I run a little theme shop called DevPress and help manage a WooCommerce shop with Universal Yums. Find me on twitter @devinsays.

246 Responses

  1. ken

    Hi Devin,

    I’m thinking of migrating our site to your Visual, its at http://originalartworks.net
    But, and I’m no computer buff! I’m a little concerned as to what the changed over site would look like and run like if I hit the accept button. Could you just confirm that the features I have on the site will all run on your theme, as I love the background colour etc, etc,

  2. certain browsers (I have Opera and Vivaldi installed) have suddenly begun to present the blog in which I use this theme with an italic version of Raleway font. Firefox presents in non-italic version. I have tried opening in a private browser window to see if cookies were affecting anything, but no. I don’t use any custom CSS.

  3. Hello Devin

    I’m using the Visual Theme since 2 years “www.toothycritters.net) now and I really like the design. Is there an option to have two or more pages where I can blog articles? I only can blog under the “Home” menue but want to have a second page.

    Thanks

      1. Hello Devin

        Yes I created different categories and assigned posts. But how do I link those categories to the menue that those post appiear under a specific menue item. I can’t find any possibility to set this. I’m still useing WP 4.0.12. Is this the problem?

        Thanks for your support
        greets
        Philipp

  4. Eva

    Hi Devin
    Such a lovely theme, thank you.
    Q. How do you ask the website to only show a small sample of the article’s text in the home page/blog page design? (as in the example on the main Themes page)

    I’d like it so that scrolling down reveals lots of articles in a short time, each with the first paragraph beneath the image, and then you click on the article to read the rest.

  5. Hi Devin! I really like your theme, been using it for two years, and I really do not want to change it. I looked at other themes, but, I like yours best, it fits with what I am working on. All of a sudden, I cannot change the header image! The customization menu does not work. The header customization menu seems disconnected. I am working for a cause and I have put many hours in the blog. I wish you could help. It was working when I started it. Is there an update that I did not see?

  6. JeanP

    Visual is terrific, I’m considering using it to post images and text snippets. Because I won’t be using is as a blog, is there a way to remove the “Posted on …” part?
    If not, where do I adjust its position?

  7. Nikola

    Hi Devin,

    First I want to thank you for the great work on the Visual theme which I use!

    I’ve just updated it to Version: 1.3.1.

    And now there are 2 more rows in the menu bar (“Menu” + “Skip to content”) which I don’t want.

    My site is: http://combobets.com/

    How can I hide (delete) them?

    Best regards,
    Nikola.

  8. PhB

    I tweaked the dates of my posts so that they’d appear in the order I want (I’m using the free version) but posts are not sorted by date. Isn’t that supposed to happen by default, like on your Visual Theme demo page?

  9. KT

    I have been enjoying your Visual theme very much, though I’m in the process of integrating an e-commerce function, and thus will only continue to use it for the blog part, as a multi-site setup.

    WordPress keeps complaining that there is a new version of the theme available. I’m using 1.2.0. What has been updated? I don’t dare to update unless I know.

  10. JeanP

    Since in Visual a single image can affect the appearance of the whole, is there a way to preview the site before committing a change?

  11. Awesome theme.

    1. Noticed lately on Visual (after WordPress update), embedding YouTube videos makes the preview show up with an odd vertical crop. Only happens on the home page.

    2. Is there a way to stick the header to the top of home page as user scrolls down?

    Been using this theme for a few years and has been great.

    1. Stuart

      I did this by modifying the CSS making
      .entry-title {
      word-break: normal; /* Stop titles chopping words */
      }
      I did it through a Child Theme (safer than messing with the distributed code) but the above change (wherever done) sorts this.

      Visual is still probably the best WordPress theme available. I hope is is being maintained as WordPress core moves forward.

  12. Dear Devin, thank you for ur wonderful theme…Is there anyway of getting social media icons instead of having to add separate links? I wanted to know if I missed something since I cant find the icons options for social media links (FB, Linkedin etc)…

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