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staff:

A closer look at Mike Harding’s featured theme: Scaffold

Scaffold, one of Tumblr’s new premium themes, uses a super-minimal layout to keep the focus on your blog’s content. Photos and videos are scaled right to the edges of the post columns, which can create a uniform grid or an awesome collage of mixed media.

Mike also gives a ton of attention to the permalink pages, switching up the layout to enlarge your photos and videos. And make sure you take a second to appreciate the search field that repositions itself when you start scrolling!

Scaffold supports just about every Tumblr feature, including pages, group blog attribution, Twitter, Disqus comments, and lots more. It only takes a second to add a custom header graphic, but changing the background will require some CSS skills.

Mike Harding:

My aim setting out was to create something simple and uncluttered, removing as much information as I could from the index pages while still retaining a good level of usability. I’ve been very inspired by the clean, minimalistic work of people like Stefan Dziallas, and David DeSandro’s work on Masonry made it possible for me to consider moving to a two-column layout — which I was keen to do so that I could use the page width to show more content, and to move away a little from the standard vertical blog format.

Check out some of the ways people are using it:

• Daisy May and Stanley Chow show off their illustrations and beautiful custom header graphics.
• João Travessa emphasizes the grid to feature his polaroid collection.
• Diedrik Dijkstra adds some great texture with background and header graphics.
• Guillaume inverts the colors, keeping the contrast great for text and making images pop.

Scaffold is available in the Theme Garden for $9. Check out the demo.

Thanks, Mike!