Premium and Free Material Design WordPress Themes

This is a collection of the best premium and free Material Design WordPress themes.

So what exactly is Material Design? Material Design is a visual interface design developed by Google “that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science”. While the definition and continually evolving spec documentation about Material Design by Google uses rather intimidating and pretentious language the fundamentals are fairly clear.

Material Design meets the point between flat design and skeuomorphism. It could be said its an extension of flat design that attempts to make web design more realistic in how it portrays elements in a way that makes sense, improving user flow and understanding and making the experience smoother. This is achieved with use of elements such as responsive animations and transitions, layering, padding, and depth effects such as lighting and shadows.

There are three core principals in Material Design: material as a metaphor, motion, and bold intentional graphics.

Material

The core metaphor of Material Design is digital Material. Inspired by paper and ink, this fictional digital “Smart Paper” is capable of moving and changing shape intelligently. It has surfaces and edges that provide visual clues grounded in reality, and seams and shadows and lighting help define objects and divide space and provide meaning and context.

Motion

Similar to Material, the concept of Motion respects that user actions are the primary focus so that the person interacting with the design controls the experience rather then the design controlling the user. As Google explain: “Motion is meaningful and appropriate, serving to focus attention and maintain continuity. Feedback is subtle yet clear. Transitions are efficient yet coherent”.

Bold, Graphic, Intentional

The principals and foundation elements of print based design – typography, grids, space, scale, color, and use of imagery – do more than please the eye but also guide your experience using hierarchy, meaning and focus. The use of bold and deliberate colors, shapely defined edge-to-edge imagery, large-scale typography, and intentional white space create an immersive user experience.

Material Design WordPress Themes

Below is a collection of WordPress themes that have attempted to use Material Design philosophy. The developers have implemented the Material Design principals in these themes with varying extents and levels of success.

Materialize

Materialize is a blog WordPress theme heavily inspired by Google’s Material Design. The premium theme from RichWP has a modern, bold and visually appealing design that follows the material design guidelines. It would be suitable for a personal or professional blog, online magazine or even a shop website.

Some of the key features include: WooCommerce ready, fully responsive mobile first layout, support for most Jetpack plugin features (like tiled galleries, contact forms etc), easy color customization options, multiple widget areas, drop down menus, easy logo integration, translation ready, icon menu, quality code to WordPress standards, and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Materialism

Materialism is a multipurpose one page WordPress theme built using the Material Design guidelines developed by Google. The premium theme from Tesla Themes has a beautiful and modern material design with lots of powerful features and options. The theme could be used for a blog, corporate or agency website, portfolio, land page to showcase your product, app or service or anything else. Some of the key features include: 40+ different content elements and advanced styling options, 2 unique homepage layouts, parallax scrolling and HTML5 video, pricing tables, Google web fonts, call to action blocks, drag and drop visual page builder and more.

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Sirius Pro

Sirius Pro is a multipurpose WordPress theme inspired by Google’s Material Design. The premium theme from Lyra Themes has a powerful set of features and options and is easy to setup and use for a variety of purposes. You could use to create an elegant, professional, and featured filled business, personal or corporate website. It features built in projects / portfolio, color customization options, parallax backgrounds, multiple home page displays, information card shortcodes, team members and testimonials, and more.

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MaterialDesignWP

The Material Design WordPress theme is a premium theme based on the MaterializeCSS.com framework. It comes with a Material Design shortcodes plugin that allows you to add lots of nice Material Design components to your pages. It features a responsive design, blog layout, portfolio template, parallax options, full width template, widget areas, contact form template and more.

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Rich Box

Rich Box is a fully responsive multi-purpose WordPress theme from RichWP. The premium theme combines the latest Material Design trends with the latest standards and best practices in WordPress theme development. The versatile theme could be used for all different types of websites and niches such as food blogs, fashion and cosmetics, design related sites, travel, affiliate or personal blogs.

The Rich Box theme has a nice grid post layout and includes some handy features and options including: easy logo integration and color change options, fullscreen menu, sidebar-less design, top and footer widget areas, WordPress post format support, HTML5 code architecture, icon menu, JetPack plugin support, translation ready, and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Zephyr

Zephyr is a customizable multipurpose premium WordPress theme that could be used for business and company sites, agencies, portfolios, blog, product websites, or any other type of project. The theme is based on the latest Material Design trend with some nice attention to detail. It has authentic motions, responsive interactions, hierarchical timings, parallax effects, 8 appearance animations for columns and images, fully responsive and a focus on typography, usability & user-experience.

The theme absolutely packed with (too many?) features, but some of the notable key features include: visual drag and drop page builder to easily built unlimited layouts, WooCommerce ready, advanced typography options, special theme options panel for easy customization and control, advanced header options, portfolio with more than 6000 combinations, unlimited color options, parallax backgrounds, translation ready, 3 different blog layouts, and lots of other elements (Accordion & Toggles, ActionBox, Button, Contact Form, Counter, IconBox, Image Gallery, Image Slider, Google Map, Message Box, Portfolio Grid, Responsive Columns, Separator, Social Links, Tabs & Timeline, Team Member, Testimonial, Video Player), 1000+ Font Awesome and Material Design icons, and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Ruby

Ruby is a portfolio and blog WordPress theme inspired by Material Design for people who want to showcase their personal projects, photographs or stories through a blog. The premium theme has an ultra-simple, modern and intuitive design that’s optimized for mobile devices. Some of the key features include: unlimited color options, admin panel for customization, Royal Slider (plugin), Essential Grid (plugin) for portfolios, various portfolio layouts, Google fonts, portfolio filter icons, numerous post formats and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Material

Material is a fully featured, multipurpose WordPress theme that could be used for all sorts of projects. Inspired from Google Material Design the premium theme which is sold on ThemeForest offers a heap of different homepage styles and unlimited variations. Some of the key features include: a visual drag and drop page builder with frontend and backend editors, 40+ content blocks, responsive and retina ready, filterable portfolio, 19 unique header blocks, parallax effects, fullscreen sections and sliders, 3 unique footer types and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Happy Hipster

The Happy Hipster WordPress theme from RichWP is a blogging theme with a very simple, hip and minimalist design. The premium theme is ideal for hipster bloggers wanting to share their deep and insightful thoughts in blog posts, post selfies or photos of their food, boutique beers or beard, videos of themselves doing cool stuff and more. Of course you don’t need to be a hipster to use the theme. It’s suitable for anyone to blog about anything. Some of the other key features of the Happy Hipster theme include: a mobile first responsive design, WooCommerce ready for ecommerce functionality, support for most JetPack features (tiled galleries, contact forms etc), support for native WordPress post formats, nice gallery and post list layouts, drop down menus, icon menu, easy logo integration, easy color customization, multiple widget areas, and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Impala

Impala is a feature packed, multipurpose, do-it-all WordPress theme that tries to apply Google Material Design principals. It has a modern flat gradient design that’s fully responsive. You could use the theme to build almost any type of website – online magazine, portfolio, agency and business, blog, coming soon page, or just about anything else.

Some of the key features and options include: drag and drop page builder for unlimited layouts, multiple headers, versatile layouts (1170px, 1024px, 900px, fullwidth, fullscreen), featured posts grid, background video options, transparent patterns, hundreds of typography options, unlimited color options, unlimited sidebars, 1200+ icons from fontAwesome and Google Material Design Icons, Built-in reviews, post formats support, and more. The theme gives you total control over layout, styling, gradient, colors, transparent patterns, fonts, icons, images position and so on.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Pinty

Pinty is an advanced Pinterest like WordPress theme that allows you to create a website like Pinterest. It allows you to create boards and categories, pin items (images, video and places with Google maps) from websites or upload your own content, create user profiles, follow users, like, re-pin and more.

The premium theme is designed using the Material Design style guide and is retina ready and mobile friendly with a responsive design. Some of the other noteworthy key features and functionality include: front end user registration and login with Google+ and Facebook, Redux framework, locate pins with Google Maps, Font Awesome icons, Google fonts, unlimited color schemes, translation ready and HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery coding.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Tactile

Tactile is a multi-concept WordPress theme that has a modern and sharp look that also claims to be Material Design. It comes packed with 14-predined layouts and lots of features and options so you could use it for all sorts of different projects and websites.

Some of the key features of the Tactile theme include: a powerful admin interface, visual composer, multiple header layouts, parallax images, AJAX transitions, video backgrounds, layer slider, multiple portfolio layouts, masonry blog layout, custom port formats, customizable footer columns, retina ready, WooCommerce integration, Google fonts, Contact Form 7 integration, WPML multilingual integration, and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Calypso

Calypso is a magazine WordPress theme with a Material Design. The premium theme allows you to display articles and stories in a nice way with character thanks to its Material Design. The developer claims that everything down the smallest elements has been carefully designed to make it consistent with itself and the Material Design principles.

Some of the notable features of the theme include: Reddit-like sorting algorithm for your posts (order them by popularity), page builder, customizable category pages (category color, post styles, sidebar placement), smart AJAX for easy navigation, mobile responsive design, one click demo data install, HTML5 and CSS3, sticky menu, custom widgets, and extensive customization options within the theme options panel.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Rich Blog

Rich Blog is a bold and modern blogging WordPress theme from RichWP. The premium theme has a clean and minimal design that would be suitable for any type of blog. The theme has a mobile first responsive design, WooCommerce integration, easy logo integration, multiple widget areas, Jetpack support (for galleries, contact form etc), color customization options, and coding that follows WordPress standards.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Obsession

Obsession is a flexible WordPress theme that can be used for one page websites or traditional multi-page websites. The theme includes some nice Material Design elements such as animated morphing buttons, info overlays, subscription form and a minimal contact form.

The theme is based in the Bootstrap framework and has a fully responsive design. The included visual drag and drop page builder, revolution slider and essential grid plugins allow you to create almost any of layout you want with pre-built elements using a drag and drop interface. Some of the other notable features of the theme include: customizable portfolio sections, smart admin panel, Google fonts, Font Awesome integration, parallax scrolling, translation ready, unlimited colors, custom page layout editing, video backgrounds, sticky header option, WPML ready and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Color

Color is a blog and portfolio WordPress theme with a unique and colorful design. Each post, page or post type can be updated with an individual accent color for a unique look and feel. Why probably more flat than material design the theme would be ideal for fans of colorful blogs.

Some of the other key features of the theme include: advanced font options, left or right sidebars, mobile first responsive design, Google maps integration, show/hide author information, Easy Digital Downloads compatibility, social sharing options, custom menu, shortcodes, portfolio post type with featured image, slider gallery or video support, team post type and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

EstateMLS

Estate MLS is a mobile responsive, Material Design real estate WordPress theme. The developer claims to have used the latest guidelines on the Material Design style in building the theme. The feature packed theme allows you to use MLS listings or show your own real estate listings.

Some of the key features include: Google Maps with property pins on it, Search (from your website or from MLS listings), front end “Add a Property” form, dsIDXpress IDX Plugin support for MLS listings, custom widgets and shortcodes, theme options with back-end unbranded admin panel based on the robust Redux Framework, unlimited colors, Google fonts, real estate agents profile page, visual composer page builder, featured properties widget, blog section and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Activism

Activism is a clean and minimal WordPress theme with a Material Design built for non-profit organizations, charities, events websites or any other business or personal site. It’s a child theme for the excellent free Layers WordPress website builder platform.

The theme features a responsive and retina ready design, donation page, custom post types (for team, gallery, box columns, testimonials, events), events list and calendar, carousel for blog news posts, one-page or multi-page website option, translation ready, Google font, and more.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Simple Material

The Simple Material WordPress theme is inspired by Google Material Design and uses the MaterializeCSS framework. It has a clean and simple layout and is mobile friendly with a responsive design. It has some great built-in features to help you customize each page and post with ease and includes a Material Design shortcode plugin to help you add Material Design components to your pages and posts.

Demo & Release Page | Download

MaterialWP

Material WP is a free blog style WordPress inspired by Material Design and powered by Bootstrap. The base of MaterialWP is the popular Underscores.me WordPress starter theme. It features a responsive design, blog layout, portfolio template, widget areas and various material design elements.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Material Gaze

Material Gaze is a clean and minimal WordPress theme that takes inspiration from Google’s Material Design. It’s a child theme for the free Stargazer parent theme. This theme is free.

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Materialist

Materialist is a free minimalist WordPress theme inspired by Material Design. It features a responsive design using a mobile first approach, accent color, quick setup, widget support and compatible with JetPacks infinite scroll.

Demo & Release Page | Download

MaterialPress

MaterialPress is a free simple WordPress influenced heavily by Google’s Material Design philosophy. Its based on the Materialize Sass / Javascript front-end framework.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Flow Box

Flow Box is a multi-purpose WordPress theme with a box-design layout and a clean and simple minimalist design. It has a visually rich design with its use of prominent featured images making it ideal for a travel blog, food blog, portfolio site, video website or anything else. Its mobile friendly with a responsive design, has easy color customization options and WooCommerce integration for ecommerce.

Demo & Release Page | Download

Let us know what you think about Material Design and if these themes have meet the guidelines and specifics of Material Design.