Semplice Brand Guidelines: Two German Designers’ 2014 WordPress Portfolio System

Two German designers and a portfolio tool built on WordPress.

Semplice is a portfolio system for designers and artists that runs on WordPress. It was founded by two German designers, Michael Schmidt and Tobias van Schneider, according to WP Tavern, the WordPress news site, which reported on 15 August 2014 that Semplice had “soft-launched” its WordPress-powered portfolio system and was selling early copies ahead of a full launch.

Van Schneider explained the idea to WP Tavern at the time. “Semplice is and was built based on our own needs to create beautiful case studies and branded pages, mainly for designer and artist portfolios,” he said, adding: “We aim to create a flexible system, not a template.” The publication described the example portfolios built with the system as striking, and noted that Semplice was aimed both at experienced WordPress users and at designers with little experience of the platform.

The business behind the product is German. The legal notice on Semplice’s website names Semplicelabs GmbH, a company entered in the commercial register at the Munich local court, with its address in Neufahrn in Bavaria, and gives Michael Schmidt as its representative. The website signs its pages “Made in the Semplicelabs.”

The New York link comes through the other co-founder. Van Schneider’s own website, House of van Schneider, carries a “New York City/BKLYN” line and describes him as the founder and creative director of the studio HOVS and as a co-founder of Semplice. So the product has a creative presence in New York while its company is registered in Bavaria.

An editor made for case studies.

From the start Semplice was built around its own editor rather than a fixed theme. WP Tavern reported in 2014 that it added a visual content editor to WordPress so that users could build branded pages and long case studies for their projects “without a single line of code,” with a live preview while editing. Van Schneider told the site that the editor combined a JavaScript front end with WordPress’s own Ajax functions talking to the PHP back end, and that the team used the Advanced Custom Fields plugin for the basic theme options.

Each page could be given its own look. The 2014 report says users could set the background colour, navigation and typography page by page instead of following one template, and could add a custom set of fonts from the web font service of their choice, which the publication singled out as important for designers who present work in specific typefaces. The software was licensed under the GPL, and it was self-hosted on the user’s own WordPress installation.

The current version is Semplice 7. The company’s changelog lists version 7.0.0 as an initial release dated 22 November 2024 and describes it as completely rebuilt, followed by a run of smaller updates. The homepage now calls Semplice a “WordPress-based portfolio tool and community,” and describes building on a grid with visual drag and drop and no templates.

Its feature pages list custom animations, including hover effects and scroll animations; custom type, with uploads of self-hosted or web fonts and support for variable typefaces; adjustable mobile breakpoints; and an “Advanced Portfolio Grid” of homepage layouts with page transitions. Semplice is sold in three editions, Single, Studio and Business, and the site also runs a shop called Supply with mockups and other resources for creatives, and a Showcase of portfolios built with the tool.

Design and documentation.

Website and portfolio builders present themselves first through their templates. Ucraft’s home page offers more than 120 “designer-made” templates sorted into categories such as business, photography, restaurants and art, and credits each one to a designer on its team; Readymag’s templates, Website Planet reported in May 2026, are grouped into company websites, landing pages, presentations, portfolios, editorials and online stores, and include designs submitted by users.

The editor is the second part of the pitch, and the products differ. Ucraft’s editor works with blocks and elements that snap into a page grid, according to reviews in TechRadar in 2021 and PCMag in 2026, with a separate page of typography, button and layout settings that the company calls Designer Tools. Readymag’s editor is freeform, with elements placed without a rigid grid and detailed type controls such as ligatures, stylistic sets and variable fonts, according to English Wikipedia; Website Planet describes it as layer-based.

Showcase sites made by users do much of the brand’s work. Ucraft keeps a gallery called “Made with U,” and Readymag runs an annual Website of the Year award for projects built on its platform, judged by a jury of designers and art directors, according to English Wikipedia. Plan and feature names follow a similar logic, pairing plain tiers with branded tools: TechRadar listed Ucraft’s paid plans in 2021 as Pro Website, Pro Shop and Unlimited, alongside features such as a logo maker.

Corporate pages on founders and owners vary widely. Ucraft’s about page gives a dated timeline and names its investor, SoftConstruct, but not its founders, while Readymag’s founders and chief executive are named in English Wikipedia and in design-press interviews. This guide sets out what each company says about itself, and what independent dated sources add.

Building with pride.

Semplice presents itself through a short manifesto. Its about page says the team is “building with pride, going the extra mile and aiming to make a difference,” and describes the product as “not a template but a powerful system,” built “by designers, for designers.” It ties that to ownership: because Semplice is self-hosted on WordPress, the page says, users “fully own the code & files,” and the company says it believes in open source and the WordPress community.

The homepage speaks to a narrow audience. Its headline invites users to “build your portfolio with pride,” and its showcase section describes Semplice as “proudly serving a niche community.” It names designers and artists it says use the tool, among them the illustrator Ash Thorp, the designer Jon Contino, the identity designer Mackey Saturday and the artist Sougwen Chung, and links to their portfolios. Its site navigation groups the rest under plain headings such as reviews, features, video tutorials, developers and support. Type is a recurring theme: the company calls itself “type lovers too,” and its resources section includes a guide to its favourite type foundries alongside guides to writing case studies and launching a portfolio.

The site keeps its own product records in public. Alongside the editions, it publishes a dated changelog of every Semplice 7 update, video tutorials, pages for developers and a support section, and its legal notice names the company and its representative. The about page closes with the same idea it opens with: Semplice “stands for pushing the boundaries, going the extra mile and building with pride.”

For a design guide, Semplice shows how a product can borrow the habits of its audience: grids, case studies and careful typography. Compare WordPress, the open-source platform it runs on, and Cargo, another portfolio platform in this series. For this guide we use black, white and a proof red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Semplice’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.