The new magazine style wordpress default theme really packs a punch with its sleek and modern design, but its impossible to account for everyone’s taste.
If TwentyTwelve isn’t for you, I have compiled a list of 20 of the best magazine themes out there.
Surfarama
Surfarama is a beautifully bold and colorful theme which is completely free. It is great for blogs and magazine style websites. The easy to use custom tools make changing colors, fonts and backgrounds simple. An ideal template for beginners.
Fashionista
Fashionista is a clean and simple responsive theme perfect for fashion bloggers, photographers or anyone wishing to show off content in a stylish way. Features include a built theme panel and options to change the look and feel of your site’s pagination.
MH Magazine
MH Magazine is a professional and 100% responsive theme suited to professional blogs and editorial related ventures. Features include custom widgets, excellent layout options and is built with SEO in mind.
Hiero
The Hiero theme is beautiful in its simplicity and is ideal for those wanting to present news articles or stylish blog posts. Some features include custom widgets, page templates and thumbnail support. Best of all its completely free.
Zee Dynamic
Zee Dynamic is a fully responsive wordpress theme which is modern and colourful. It is suitable for various uses such as blogs, news sites and magazines. There are many great features such as post slider, custom menus and custom backgrounds.
BoldR Lite
BoldR Lite is a bright, bold and professional looking wordpress theme that is based on the powerful Icefit framework. The responsive design is great for news related websites or online magazines, and as it’s released under the GPL licence it means the theme can be used on as many sites as you want.
Max Mag
Max Mag is a bold but simple professional media and magazine theme which is fully responsive. It is retina-ready and compatible with WooCommerce and bbPress. It also includes unlimited color schemes, a “sticky” menu bar, a slider on each category page and 5 different ad units, these are just a few of its rich features.
Aldehyde
Best suited for blog and magazine style wordpress sites, Aldehyde is extremely simple yet sophisticated theme with many features. Some of these include Parallax Header, Numbered page navigation, Responsive Slider, Customizable Header and Footer and 4 Page Layouts.
Apollo
Apollo is a beautifully professional looking theme which looks amazing on any device. Its stunning design is great for portfolios, online magazines or any image orientated websites. Features include two Home Styles for Slider and Video Version and 2 Animated Styles as well as Home Full screen Slider.
Hueman WordPress Theme
One of the most popular wordpress themes, Hueman is perfect for image based blogs or magazine style websites. 100 % responsive it features unlimited top bar, header, footer and accent colours, unlimited widget areas, 0-2 sidebars to the left or right that can be uniquely specified for each page or post.
Squirrel
Using the squirrel theme is simple and easy to use as well as looking minimal but smart. It is perfect for almost any type of website. Features include 8 colour styles, gallery template, and lots of short codes, individual post / page customisation options, theme options panel and more.
Duel Shock
Duel Shock is a free blog and magazine theme which is sleek and simple to use. Features include an options panel, custom widgets, translation-ready functionality and search engine optimization.
Ribbon
The Ribbon WordPress theme is completely free and is fully responsive. Suited to general bloggers its many features include unlimited colour schemes and backgrounds, options panel and custom widgets. It is also translation-ready for those wishing to attract a global audience.
Portal
Another great free theme. Portal is clean and sleek and ideal for bloggers or online magazines. Again this would suit image heavy websites as the grid layout allows viewers to see up 9 of the most recent posts and photos. It is also fully responsive and SEO optimized.
Pinboard
Pinboard is a perfect theme for lifestyle type blogs especially if you’re looking to use images, videos, photo galleries and podcasts. Its sleek and modern design comes with a host of features like options panel, custom widgets, SEO optimized, fully responsive and is completely free.
Berlin
Minimal yet very sophisticated, this free theme is great for portfolio type blogs and news related websites. It includes custom backgrounds, theme customize options and is fully responsive.
Koi WordPress Theme
Koi is a sophisticated and modern theme suited to creative type websites, especially for those looking to showcase their portfolio. The grid based theme is clean and functional and offers built in SEO as well as WordPress Live Customizer.
Wallpress
Wallpress is the perfect theme for online magazines as is grid based and simple design allows your content to stand out. It is fully responsive and is completely free.
