I’m offi­cially announc­ing Wu Wei, a free, open-source, GPL-licensed WordPress theme I designed over the course of a few months.

I really enjoy web design. The only prob­lem is that I when I’m sat­is­fied with a lay­out like this, I don’t feel the need to change it (aside from small tweaks), which means I don’t get a chance to come up with some­thing new.

So I decided to cre­ate a WordPress theme for the pub­lic. That way I can con­tinue to flex my design mus­cles, and other peo­ple can have the ben­e­fit of using it.

Wu Wei has been a labour of love. This is the theme I always wanted to cre­ate — bold fonts, a clean look, with lots of con­trast. The devil is in the details, like the way every­thing aligns neatly to the grid.

With almost 2000 down­loads so far, there’s been some nice buzz:

• tweeted by Smashing Magazine (with over 40,000 fol­low­ers, which gave me a month’s worth of traf­fic in a sin­gle day) and con­se­quently re-tweeted by dozens of people
• book­marked on delicious
• digged
• men­tioned on wpazo*, WereWP, and L² Express

Someone also sent me this e-mail:

Hey Jeff, I love the theme. I was casu­ally brows­ing around for some­thing very clean and mod­ern look­ing — I saw the name “Wu Wei” and I down­loaded it imme­di­ately. It turned out to be perfect!

As a prac­tic­ing young taoist I fig­ured the name was perfect.

Take it easy,
Justin

I love see­ing how dif­fer­ent peo­ple are using the theme, whether they’re blog­gers, come­di­ans, pho­tog­ra­phers, review­ers, or design com­pa­nies. You can check out the demo page here.

This theme is only the first of a tril­ogy of WordPress themes I have planned, based on Taoist ideas. Wu Wei is ded­i­cated to my Tai Chi teacher, Michael Babin. And since the con­cept of wu wei or “effort­less action” is impor­tant in inter­nal mar­tial arts like Tai Chi Chuan as well, I thought it was only fit­ting that he should have the hon­our of the first dedication.