Clear is a simple, text-first WordPress theme built for people who want their writing to be the product. It is inspired by Medium-style editorial layouts, with calm typography, generous spacing, featured images, and clean archive pages.
Why I built it
I wanted a WordPress theme that felt more like a modern writing platform and less like a traditional blog template. Most themes either do too much, look too busy, or make the writing feel secondary to the design.
Clear is intentionally restrained. The goal is to make posts easy to read, easy to browse, and easy to reference from search engines, AI tools, and social links.
What Clear focuses on
- Readable typography: long-form posts should feel calm and comfortable, not cramped.
- Editorial layouts: featured images can be left-aligned, right-aligned, or full-width depending on the post.
- Medium-like archives: home and archive pages are designed around scanning titles, excerpts, authors, and dates.
- Responsive design: posts should read well on mobile, tablet, and desktop.
- SEO-friendly structure: clean headings, semantic article markup, readable excerpts, and crawlable content.
- Open-source defaults: the theme avoids being overly specific to one site and is designed to be customized.
Post layout options
Clear supports a few simple post presentation styles using layout tags. This gives you some editorial control without needing a page builder.
layout-full-width-imagefor a wide hero image above the post.layout-left-imagefor an image beside the title and excerpt.layout-right-imagefor the reversed version of the same layout.- No layout tag for a clean text-first post.
These layout tags are used as theme controls. They are not intended to be shown as public tags on the front end.
Good for
- Personal blogs
- Founder writing
- Engineering blogs
- Essays and long-form posts
- Simple publication-style websites
- Writers who want WordPress without a visually heavy theme
Not trying to be
Clear is not a page builder, a marketing site framework, or a theme packed with dozens of visual options. It is deliberately narrow: a clean WordPress theme for publishing words, images, and ideas.
Current status
Clear is a work in progress. The theme is usable, but I am still refining the typography, spacing, archive layouts, mobile navigation, and WordPress.org submission readiness.
The direction is simple: make the theme boringly well-structured first, then make it beautiful.
Roadmap
- Cleaner CSS architecture and design tokens
- Better editor/front-end typography parity
- Improved homepage and archive layouts
- More polished mobile navigation
- More accessible pagination and post navigation
- Lightweight SEO and structured-data improvements
- Theme Review and WordPress.org readiness
Install from GitHub
You can download the theme from GitHub and install it through the WordPress admin theme uploader.
git clone https://github.com/alexmaitken/wordpress-clear-theme.git
If you try it, feedback is welcome. The best feedback is specific: a screenshot, the device/browser, and what felt off.