Monotone

Monotone, created by Noel Jackson, is an interesting photoblogging theme. Using it sometimes feel like doing magic. Working with it is pretty hassle free – it adapts to your images, automatically creates an archive page without extra work and is generally well thought through. You can see it in action on D’Arcy Norman’s homely Mindful Seeing or showcasing Stephen Probert’s beautiful photography.

Placing pictures in your posts

Monotone does an interesting thing with your images. If you take a look at the demo you’ll see that it places the pictures above the headline and body text. That leads one to think that the theme uses a custom field or checks if you’ve uploaded an image to your post – but it doesn’t. You place your image in your body field as usual, and then Monotone goes through your body text, strips it of all image tags, and places the first image used above the fold. Like magic.

The only drawback with this is that you cannot under any circumstance display more than one picture in any post. Still, considering the way most photoblogs are set up this is a minor issue. Otherwise it’s all good: the pictures display in your feed, you get ample room for eventual text and you can use photos hosted elsewhere (like on flickr). This last part can be a huge benefit, depending on how you’ve planned your setup.

Monotone uses magic to adapt itself to your photo

The theme’s trademark feature that makes Monotone appear worked by magic is the fact that it changes color depending on your photo. That’s right – if you upload a photo that’s mostly red, the background will change to a red hue to better match the image. Same thing goes for blue, green, black and any other color.

Other neat things is the automatic resizing of the main content area (between 560-840 pixels depending on your photo), clicking on left/right parts of the image to navigate to next/previous post, and the automatic thumbnail archives.

And some bad stuff

Yet despite all the wonders Monotone do have a few drawbacks. I’ve already mentioned that you cannot have more than one picture in your post since the theme strips all images to place the first one above the title. Another potential drawback is image size – if you upload an image larger than 800 pixels or so it will stretch outside the main content area, and sometimes the link and text colors contrast too much or little against the background. And now that it’s become one of the themes for blogs on wordpress.com, it’s not exactly a rare look.

Despite these flaws, however, Monotone is a solid Wordpress theme. If you like the layout it’s full of perks that will delight your visitors.

Others about Monotone

The founder of Wordpress introduces Monotone – Matt Mullenweg wrote a short introduction to Monotone when it was added as a theme on wordpress.com.
The comments on the Monotone Demo – The Monotone demo site is full of fun comments from users.