Customizing Fluid Theme

The theme you see on my tumblr page currently is known as the “Fluid Theme” by Metalab. It’s a great looking theme, but I’m a designer so I intend to make my own. I’m new to tumblr so I thought I’d start by customizing an existing theme and slowly working it into something that fits with my branding over at painteddigital.com

Let’s get started

To start customizing, you first need to enable the theme in your tumblr “customize” options and click the button to allow custom HTML. Now we can see some code! If you scroll way down to the bottom, you can see these large bars of “#” signs that look like this:

Remove the Code

Thankfully, Metalab has set up up with an easy template to edit. You will notice a line that says “Uncomment this…” We are going to delete that line and the line that says “—>” near the bottom. Once you’ve deleted those, you can go about inserting your own links into the sidebar as I’ve done.

You’ll want to change the link inside the href=”” and change the description. For more info on html links, read here. If you have any questions, ask away. You can see my edited HTML below.

Adding Categories

You might notice that I also applied the same formatting to create “Categories.” Tumblr doesn’t have categories like Wordpress has them, so you can create your own by tagging a post in whatever format you like and then add a link to your sidebar with the format “http://your_tumblog/tagged/your_tag” you can see how I did it in above.

I hope you found this post useful. I’m going to keep adding and adjusting as I learn tumblr and one day, it’ll look completely different. If you found all this to be above your head, you can hire me to design and develop a tumblog for you. I work as a freelancer and you can see some of my work at http://painteddigital.com

You can also buy some custom tumblr themes at themeforest: