WordPress theme for personal bloggers — Ryu is now available on WordPress

The theme this blog uses, “Ryu” is now available on WordPress. Yes, you guessed right. It’s named after the main character of the classic game🙂 If you know why the character was named Ryu, you will understand why I named this theme Ryu too🙂

I’ve created this free theme specifically for the Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter generation of personal bloggers.

ryu

Demo site →

What I mean by “Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter generation of personal bloggers” is bloggers who don’t necessarily spend long time writing long articles but often post more shorter ones or just images, videos, links, and so on. As you can see in this blog and the demo site, each post format has own style but the image format has a notable characteristic.

Do you remember the classic theme called Duotone? One of my teammates, Matías Ventura created Tonesque, a fantastic plugin inspired by Duotone. Tonesque lets us grab the average color of an image. Ryu uses it as an instrument to automatically change the background color of each post with image post format.

ryu-image-post
Image formatted post example

Other main features of the theme are the following:

  • Post formats: Standard, Video, Image, Gallery, Aside, Link, and Quote.
  • Wide width layout. The maximum width is 1272px wide so that you can show off your beautiful images in big size.
  • Site owner’s Gravatar in the header. You’ve set your Gravatar, right?
  • Grand typography.
  • No sidebar. Yes, this is a feature. Let readers to concentrate on the content! For the generation of personal bloggers, the traditional sense of sidebar is often less important and we often just ignore whatever is in a sidebar anyway.
  • Four optional widget areas in the top panel.
  • Social link badges to your profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, GitHub, Dribbble, Tumblr, YouTube, and Vimeo.
  • No menu or a custom menu. A blog should have a menu only if it needs one. Ryu doesn’t display a menu as a default to keep it as simple as possible. Of course, if your blog needs a menu you can easily set up a Custom Menu.
  • Support for flexible height Custom Header, a Custom Background.
  • And of course it’s responsive. It looks and works great on smaller screens, such as the iPad and iPhone too.

Check out more info about Ryu on the theme showcase page and the announcement post on WordPress News.

Don’t worry, self-hosted users🙂 Ryu is going to be also available on for you soon now available in Extend.

Author: Takashi Irie

I'm a designer, father, husband, and house music lover living in the UK. I work at Automattic; the people who make WordPress, Jetpack, and a whole bunch of cool stuff.

13 thoughts on “WordPress theme for personal bloggers — Ryu is now available on WordPress”

  1. Hi! Congrats on the design of Ryu! I love it!
    I just have a question and would really appreciate it if you could answer it for me.
    I love that in the image format you can see your pictures really big on the page, but
    I dont like that it automatically changes the backgroud color. I want the images to be big, but the backgroung in white how can I do that? please!
    Thanks!!!!!

    1. The background change for image post is one of the feature of the theme and If your blog is on WordPress, I’m afraid you can’t disable the feature because you can’t change the theme files.

  3. Your design is just beautiful. Thanks you very much for creating it. It makes me very happy.

  4. This theme is so beautiful, but I really need a sidebar😦 Do you have a similar theme or is there a way to customize this theme with a sidebar?

    So bummed, this is TRUELY a beautiful theme. Thanks for creating it and making it free🙂

  5. The theme is so beautiful. Minimalistic and elegant.

    Thank you.

    Can I know what plugin do you use for comment in this website (takashiirie)?

  6. I came late to the game, but I just wanted to say thanks for this wonderful theme. After having worked with I don’t know how many (usually bloated and rather useless) so-called “professional” and/or “premium” themes it is refreshing to use a theme that just works and does what it says it does.

    No headaches.
    Thanks for that.

    You saved another life.😉

  7. The instilled Tonesque seems brilliant. Many thanks for sharing the template!

  8. Mr Takashi I think i adore this Blog Skin Or Blog Templete,because i loves Writing/Typing and Shooting for Photography or Make some Picture using my Small Photo Camera on my Mobile Phone ^_^