Of the thousands of WordPress themes currently available, some of the coolest use a stylishly dark aesthetic and design. From minimalist and clean, urban or grungy, to quirky and playful, there are many darkly coloured themes to choose from when creating a blog or folio niche. This post brings together 15 of the finest contemporary themes.

1. Sleek Black

Carla Izumi Bamford has created a no-nonsense minimalist theme with a clean black, grey and white colour scheme lending the design its professional, cutting-edge aesthetic. Sleek Black is search-engine-optimised and features widget-ready boxes and sidebars.

2. New York

WpSkinner presents New York, a superb dark theme that combines fantastic visuals with practical functionality. A slightly grimy urbanism is emphasised with a city skyline background and nice transparency effects. A range of useful features and customisation options compliments the fast-loading structure and two-column lay out.

3. Suffusion

Suffusion is a sleek browser-safe theme available in 16 colour combinations, but at its best with a sleek dark background. The extensive set of theme options include one, two and three-column fixed-width formats, eight widget areas, and a pair of customisable drop-down menus for pages, categories and links. Suffusion supports featured posts, threaded comments and widgets for Twitter, social networks and Google Translator.

4. Smoke

This dark theme offers a very professional feel to any blog. Swirling smoke in the background and clever use of opacity features and lighting make Smoke an extremely attractive design.

5. Motion

Motion is a simple and elegant WordPress theme, ideal for blogging niches. The theme features a two-column lay out, drop-down menus, widget-ready footer and sidebar. A beautiful aesthetic is achieved with a subtly coloured background and nice transparency characteristics.

6. Station Pro

This cool dark theme from PageLines features multiple colour options for really professional looking pages. The theme is designed to be stylish and functional with sensible navigation and 20 feature options to allow users to tweak to their requirements. It is fully widget-ready and supports many plug-ins and custom CSS.

7. Dark Atlantica

Dark Atlantica is a platform for artists, designers, photographers, in fact any kind of creative practioners, to showcase their work in a stylishly dark setting. The beautifully laid out portfolio theme is functional and adaptable with all the key features needed to present images and content.

8. Jarrah

This theme, with a distinctive black and grey metallic aesthetic, is ideal for presenting professional looking blog pages. Clean and easy to use, the widget-ready lay out includes two columns, an optional three-column footer, sticky posts and threaded comments.

9. Black Urban

Anton ShevchukÕs widget-ready theme is grimy, grungy and darkly cool. The perforated, distressed metal background sets of chalky urban icons and barbed wire detailing, creating an impressive aesthetic.

10. Sliding Door

The key feature of this theme is the sliding image header, a neat design that makes Sliding Doors ideal for portfolios, photo-blogging or any niche with image-led content. Wayne Connor has created this theme, and offers a comprehensive support forum to help users get started and get the most from his templates.

11. Picture Perfect

This is another theme created by Wayne Connor, a clean black and white design also aimed at photo-blogs and content with the focus on images. The lay out and aesthetics give the theme the look and feel of a traditional website rather than a WordPress platform.

12. Piano Black

Mono-Lab presents a totally stylish and professional theme, with a dark and minimalist design. Piano Black has everything expected of a niche blog template: threaded comments, theme options, page navigation, multi-level drop-down menus, and is widget and translation-ready.

13. Dark Wood

Dark Wood represents the lighter side of dark WordPress themes, with wood grain background setting off brightly coloured link and header icons. The design is playful yet practical, with three columns, two widget-ready side bars and a brown search bar styled to match the wood theme.

14. The Last Fall

This theme has an alluring dark colour scheme with hints of orange. The lay out aims to give great exposure to usersÕ images, and the themeÕs features include sliding sidebar link categories and a sliding comments list.

15. Brave Zeenat

Brave Zeenat is a crisp theme aimed at artists, designers and photographers to showcase their work in a portfolio platform. The theme has all the features necessary to create a successful WordPress folio site.

This guest post was written by blogger and designer, Tom Walker. He works as an editor for an online store specialising in HP 344 ink and refills as well as other supplies for creatives. He is the editor of and regular contributor to CreativeCloud, a blog about print media design and advertising.

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