dress your blog up with a theme that says in another life, you’d probably be reincarnated into a smiski 💚
live preview ★ free download here
— includes theme guide, credits & code
★ core features
single column container
npf + legacy friendly 400px posts
browser tab title, blog title, subtitle and description
1 - 2 sidebars
3 - 6 custom links
customizable font sizes, color scheme and tumblr controls
maximize freewill by dragging the smiskis anywhere
can even replace some of them with your own PNGs
scroll at the bottom of your posts to find a lil guy
★ theme notes
slow connection will cause the theme or some parts of it to look glitched out. just refresh and patiently wait for the smiskis to fix that up on the back-end !
unable to test on other browsers / screen sizes, but is so far suitable for google chrome + safari desktop with the ff. screen resolutions: 1280 x 800, 1440 x 900, 1512 x 982px.
this first theme of mine took a whole month to finish and i just got the courage to publicly release it 🥹 so likes and reblogs are greatly appreciated, thank you !
I am once again BEGGING everyone and especially artists on [tumblr] to please PLEASE enable custom themes!
So often do I want to share a post with a friend on Discord or elsewhere, especially art, but I can't link the post directly because the blog owner doesn't have a custom theme enabled, which means only people with a Tumblr account can view the post. It also won't embed properly on Discord or in other chats.
This means the only way for me to show them the post is to copy/paste the image itself or take a screenshot, which means no proper credit, and my friends will have no way to visit the blog to view more.
Having no custom theme means gatekeeping people just like Instagram/Facebook/TikTok. It does NOT encourage people to make a Tumblr account. Folks having the ability to see artists they want to follow, DOES.
It's not difficult to install a custom theme either! Here's a few examples I whipped up quickly using just one (1) theme, no coding required:
It doesn't have to be fancy, though! It just has to be enabled.
I'll explain how here:
(Also please consider reblogging for visibility.)
First you go to your blog settings (https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/BLOGNAMEHERE) and enable the Custom Theme.
Then you need to find a theme that you like. The easiest way is to visit the https://www.tumblr.com/themes website and pick one of the free ones there. There are also blogs on Tumblr that advertise free themes, so do some research if you like.
Let's say you find one that you like on /themes. All you have to do is click the "install" button at the top right corner (though I recommend previewing it first):
You will now be taken to your blog with the new theme enabled. You're done! Thank you!
But if you want to tinker with it some more - which is the fun part - you can do that too.
Go back to your blog settings (https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/BLOGNAMEHERE) and locate the Custom Theme toggle and click the Edit Theme button.
This will take you to a new page with a load of settings on your left hand side. The available settings depend on the coding of the theme but usually it will let you change backgrounds, colours, titles, fonts and much more.
In an instant, I went from this:
To this:
Or this:
Or even this:
A simple pixelated theme.
Have fun with it. There's so many to choose from and a lot of them are tailor made for either art blogs, or text based blogs or whatever suits you.
You can, if you're daring, even edit the HTML directly, though I can't teach you how to do that.
From now on even people can access your blog and scroll through it their leisure without an account, and anyone people can link to your posts directly.
Thank you for putting the work in and not gatekeeping this hellsite. This really is a great way to encourage new people to join and get eyes on your content, when people are able to view a blog freely.
I'm so sad that the art of customizing your tumblr blog has been lost
People used to share html codes and tutorials to add fun stuff to your page, custom themes, cursors, fandom banners, mp3 players. When entering someone's blog you would get blasted with their playlist
Tumblr girlies(gn) don't know how to html code anymore, what happened to society
Attention: Theme developers and blog customizers on web
We’ve made some big updates to our Custom Theme documentation to help you create themes that support our Neue Post Format (NPF) and un-nested reblog UI.
What’s New:
Example theme markup – which includes our un-nested reblog UI.
Updated “Reblogs” section with explanations and examples of how to use the un-nested reblog UI in your themes in favor of the old blockquote representation.
Clarification on how to support NPF with existing theme variables.
In case you missed it, we’ve updated the Theme Garden to feature a collection of NPF-compatible themes (marked with a red star).
Want to learn more about how to customize your blog theme on web? Have a look at our Help Center article.
Learn more about how to submit your own themes to the Theme Garden for other people to use or purchase. Be sure to review our Theme Submission Guidelines beforehand! We’re looking forward to seeing your creations.
For bug reports and feature requests, please submit a ticket using our Support Form.
It has been quite some time since I last shared my work with this community. After a hiatus of several years, I am pleased to announce my return to theme development.
For those who may remember my previous work under another blog have returned with a fresh perspective and a new identity: whereinmnl.
To mark this occasion, I am proud to present my first new theme in years: Nimbus.
Nimbus is a minimal, dark-mode theme designed to prioritize atmosphere and clarity. It reflects a softer, more modern approach to the structures I used to build, featuring a "pill" style navigation system and subtle interactive elements that bring a sense of calm to your blog.
Key Features:
Atmospheric Design: A soft, dark gray palette intended for ease of reading.
Dynamic Interactions: Images transition from grayscale to full color upon hover.
Streamlined Navigation: Customizable "collection" tabs for your most important tags.
Floating Elements: Includes a floating status widget and a credit badge in the top right.
A Scroll to Top button: I mean, how convenient is that?
Fully Responsive: optimized for all screen sizes.
Creating this theme was a way for me to reconnect with the creativity I missed during my time away. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed building it.
I had to disable my custom theme because I realised it still showed my old about page and I couldn't figure out how to edit or remove it on mobile :/
Is there a way to do that though? Like, the customise theme page loads just fine aside from looking tiny on my phone, but pages are too far down the sidebar to fit on the screen and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to scroll down. No matter where I "grab" the page, it always just scrolls the preview instead of the sidebar.
