We live in a golden age of creativity and art. Technology and the internet have not only put the ability to design within reach of anyone, but ecommerce innovation has made it possible for more people to make a living in the creative arts than at any time in human history.
For artists who want to get started selling their products online, we’ve compiled four of our favorite Shopify themes that lend themselves to artists and their art businesses in the broadest sense – from painters and photographers to sculptors and woodcarvers and beyond. If you make a living crafting, designing, or selling visual products online, we think these three Shopify themes are worth a look to make your work shine.
Artistic Shopify themes for your creative business
We work with some of the best Shopify theme developers in the world every single day, so we see hundreds of great themes on an ongoing basis. Most themes have all the features you need, while others require minor Shopify theme customizations to reach their full potential. Whichever the case, we’ve seen them all! Before we get into our recommendations, it’s important to explain how we decided which Shopify themes are the best for artists.
The basics — great images displayed well
As you might imagine, a Shopify theme for visual products needs to be great at displaying images. This doesn’t just mean “room for lots of pictures.” It means that the theme organization and design don’t distract from the quality and impact of the images placed in it — the products, your art, will sell themselves. The theme compliments the art without getting in the way.
It also means that the theme is designed to appeal to creative customers. Not only that, but it has the kinds of built-in features that painters, designers, graphic artists, photographers — and anyone else like yourself who wants to sell highly visual products online — wants in their ecommerce store.
Without further ago, here are our current four favorite Shopify themes for Arts and Artists, in no particular order.
Alchemy theme by Clean Canvas
When it comes to selling art, photography, or any products that rely on strong, powerful images, the Alchemy Shopify theme from Clean Canvas is top-notch. Crisp and clean, they really designed this theme to showcase products and enhance the store's ability to do visual storytelling — your products are front and center.
The Alchemy theme is packed with extra features to help you sell your art.
From animations to lookbooks and color swatches, the Clean Canvas team has done everything possible to take the heavy lifting on themselves. All you need to do is the initial branding customization to make it look and feel like your art’s aesthetic, and Clean Canvas has taken care of nearly everything else
Icon theme by We Are Underground
The entire premise behind We Are Underground’s Icon theme is in the name: it’s simple, clean, modern, and designed to help you make your creations iconic. If you’re a graphic designer selling art prints or a sculptor selling your latest work, the Icon theme gets out of the way to let your work stand independently.
Our favorite built-in features that give it a place in this list are the infinite scroll option on collection pages and the ability to use high-resolution images to make the most of the online real estate and crystal clear screens. As an artist, you are all about the visuals, adding some videos to the flow in of your homepage will also be the perfect place to share your founder's story or artistic process to help build emotional connections with your website visitors.
Studio Theme by Shopify
If you’re looking to get started as fast as possible and don’t have the budget for a premium theme that has all the features pre-packaged, then the free Studio theme from Shopify might be what you need to get your site launched. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the themes created by development and design studios. Still, if you just want to get your products online and will worry about making an optimized experience later, then Studio might be okay.
Shopify has improved the quality of its basic themes over the years. A lot of that improvement is thanks to Shopify’s Online Store 2.0 and the ability to do basic customizations more easily out of the box. It’s not a perfect theme, but it is specifically designed to complement art sales with features that highlight the visual aspect of the products and encourage visual storytelling.
While still a pretty basic theme, our reasons for including Studio as one of our choices are similar to our reason for selecting the Startup theme above – it’s simple, clean, and modernized without being stuffy.
More themes to come
One of the great things about the Shopify Community and the growing developer ecosystem is that new ideas and themes come are constantly being created. Today's best themes might be replaced by even better ones as soon as tomorrow. Like all entrepreneurs selling things on their Shopify stores, innovation within the developer community is constant. We’re excited to see all the updates and new themes that come out of the community in the weeks, months, and years to come.
Have an existing theme you need to customize to suit your art brand’s needs better? Get a free quote