Designer and developer Anders Norén has released a new free block theme called Abisko, created to fully support the new design features available in the latest WordPress 6.2 release. The theme was named for one of Norén’s favorite stomping grounds, Abisko national park, where he hikes every summer.
Abisko places a strong emphasis on both images and typography, featuring the geometric “Plus Jakarta Sans” font for both headings and paragraph text. Plus Jakarta Sans was designed by Gumpita Rahayu from Tokotype in 2020. It seems to be gaining popularity and was mostly recently featured in the free Lemmony theme we reviewed last month. Plus Jakarta Sans is available as a free variable font and also on Google Fonts.
At a font weight of 800, Abisko’s H1 and H2 headings make a major statement in the design across the various templates and patterns. Norén contrasts this with liberal use of whitespace so it doesn’t end up feeling overbearing.
Abisko includes five different style variations, with unique color palettes that will change the entire look and feel of the site. These are found under Appearance > Editor and can be accessed through the Styles panel and applied globally when editing any template.
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Abisko packages more than 30 patterns for users to mix and match in creating pages. These include a grid with logo types, various artfully designed gallery layouts, contact section, various calls-to-action, hero patterns with images and background colors, testimonials grid, FAQ section, features list, a pricing table, large numbered lists, a wide separator with vertical margins, and more.
The theme also has five full-page layouts available as patterns: About Us, Contact Us, FAQ, Front Page, and a Linktree style page.
The evolution of WordPress themes, becoming fully editable and packaged with style variations and dozens of patterns, means there is no single screenshot that can fully represent what a theme might look like. Check out the live demo to see what is possible and the page that previews all the block patterns.
“Same as most block themes, Abisko is really lightweight and fast,” Norén said in a post introducing his theme. “It has a small CSS file, includes no JavaScript at all, and uses locally hosted variable fonts to keep external requests and page size at a minimum.”
Abisko is available for free on WordPress.org. Although Norén said he designed it with travel blogs in mind, it’s flexible for many different use cases, including agencies, portfolios, businesses, and personal websites.
