I am a big fan of woodcut (and linocut) printing – I think they look amazing. Something about the imperfections in the printing process really appeals to me. I particularly like the work of Lou Tonkin and Nick Hayes. The latter designed the Right To Roam website, which looks amazing.

I thought it would be interesting to try to create a WordPress theme that emulates that effect without having to go to the effort of creating wood/lino cuts! Of course it will never look as good as the real thing, but the effect is quite interesting I think:

This is a Block theme, which means it takes advanatage of a lot of the latest Gutenberg features – you will need to be using the latest Gutenberg plugin if you want it to look at its best (or wait for WordPress 6.1!).

This theme ships with an inverted style variation, so you can make it dark. I may add more style variations in the future if there is interest.

The theme is also designed to make it very easy to customize – for example it’s trivial to make the left column a different color, or to make the whole site a different color. If you’re interested in Block theme development I encourage you to have a look at the code.

Woodcut is available on the WordPress.org directory and on GitHub.