Blask Theme Review

General design

This portfolio theme impresses users by its seamless, sleek and straightforward design. Besides, the demo brings about a retro beauty because of the black-and-white pictures. If you don't want this classic style, you just need to choose color pictures. Your pictures will change the whole look of your website to be more colorful.

Other elements

Contributing to the classic style is the grey color. This color is unchangeable but the white background can be replaced by any color or image, making it creative as users may desire.

The typography is also a safe and common choice for a minimal theme. The family fonts are Arimo Roboto Condensed. They are legible, simple and make the appearance "condensed", very suitable for the theme's general style.

I love the sticky sidebar menu and the way it's designed. This area looks airy, straightforward and also prettify by the nice social icons and intuitive title. Furthermore, you can scroll the menu up and down conveniently no matter how long it is.

Do you know why this WordPress portfolio is very seamless? Thanks to the default masonry structure, surely. The archive portfolio page displays all your projects with the featured images in a well-organized way. And if you pay attention to it, you will soon realize that the footer isn't displayed on this kind of page. I think the author does it intentionally to avoid distraction and to draw the reader's eyes on the projects.

Especially, the effect when I hover makes them more interesting and vivid. It's like you frame your picture to keep the spotlight on your project.

Because this portfolio theme just focuses on the portfolio page, the blog archive looks a bit boring without the featured images. In addition, you are compulsory to show the full post so the blog becomes extremely lengthy. Unfortunately, you are not able to change these styles.

Lastly, I want to say that the footer column that you are allowed to add on the normal pages looks quite unsymmetrical. This portfolio theme enables people to add two default footer columns. But even when I add enough two columns, a blank space still appears on the right side like this.

Responsive

You will see a reasonable and nice design in all viewports. Or it can be said that the design is responsive. It's well-displayed in PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone without any mistake.

To install and use this WordPress portfolio theme immediately, you need no enclosed plugin or anything. But it doesn't support one-click demo import so you have to set it up in a traditional way, which is quite different.

To make Blask similar to the demo, you need a static front page first. If you are familiar with WordPress themes, I bet that you may know how to choose a static homepage in the Customizer. Next, go to Edit Post, select the Portfolio Page template and then create your projects in the Dashboard. After that, you have all you need for a pretty portfolio homepage. You may think it's quite complicated, yet don't give up because it is simpler than in your thought.

Other common features for a portfolio theme are all provided, enough for you to use. Besides, Jetpack is required to activate some features like Site Logo and Portfolios.

This theme doesn't give you many customization tools, just enough standard things like widget, menu, color, background image...There are no options for typography, layout, and header. But it can be an advantage for the beginner as they can save time to customize their theme.

The Customizer allows you to change all the custom features. As for the Dashboard, you need it to create your project in Portfolio. All the manipulations are very simple and easy to implement.

There are two ways to embellish your website: choosing color and background image. But as for the color, you can change nothing but the background color.

The social menu is easily customizable. You just need to insert the URL and the icons will appear appropriately on the menu. This method allows you to add any site as many as you want.

The header image for the portfolio page helps this page more prominent. But you are not allowed to resize the image so you should crop before uploading.

The gallery is very stunning and beautiful, right? But it's still compatible with the Tiled Galleries from Jetpack when you set up the modules and adapt some requirements.

If you insert a video, it will look quite modest.

The blockquote takes a massive area.

After testing by some tools, I found that this WordPress portfolio theme hasn't been totally ready for SEO yet. Hence, you must install a support plugin to have this feature. If you are not familiar with this field, I bet that you will find it hard to find a suitable plugin yourself as the author doesn't recommend any at all.

Regarding the speed, I used PageSpeed Insight. You can see and compare the result here. It's so great. Blask has brilliant speed so you don't have to think about time load.

The documentation guides you to set up everything about Blask. It's written carefully with detail instructions and illustrations. But I think it should be step-by-step to make it clearer.

There is a free support forum where the staff helps you quickly with their kindness and enthusiasm. Don't bother to create a topic and ask your theme-related questions here.

I haven't seen any comment from the author in the WordPress support forum so I guess you just can receive the user's support here.