Kester

What Kester is

Kester is one of Squarespace's own free 7.1 templates, built on Fluid Engine and styled as the portfolio of an independent designer and illustrator. The demo site is called Ida Kester: black, white and grey with a red accent, big bold headlines and a set of playful project titles (Gary Gators Locksmith, Tex Mex T-Rex, Comfort Wants You Dead) that tell you this is a creative's site, not a corporate one. The old listing on this page sold Kester as a template for technology companies with product documentation and support pages; it is nothing of the sort. There is no documentation, no product pages for software and no support centre in the demo. It is a five page creative portfolio with a small merch shop attached.

What it does

The pages in the demo are Home, Work, Shop, Blog and Contact. Work is a Squarespace portfolio collection with six sample projects, each opening as its own case study page, which is the right structure for a designer who wants to show process rather than a single grid of thumbnails. Shop is a standard Squarespace store page with two sample t-shirts, so you inherit real product pages and a working cart for merch or prints. Blog is a standard blog with two placeholder posts, and Contact is a form page. Home ties it together with a bold introduction and links into the work. Every section is drag and drop in Fluid Engine, and the high-contrast palette lives in Site Styles, so it softens with a settings change if red and black is too loud.

Who it suits

Graphic designers, illustrators, art directors, animators and small studios who want a portfolio with case study pages, a blog for process posts and a place to sell a few products. It is a good fit for freelancers with a strong visual identity and a sense of humour. It is not a template for a tech startup, a SaaS product or a documentation site: for those, look at a template built around feature pages and long-form text.

One honest caveat

Kester gives you a bold skeleton and a lot of personality, and both cut both ways. The layout depends on confident work and short, punchy copy; a cautious portfolio with long descriptions will fight the design. The Shop page only becomes useful on a Business plan or higher, since Personal does not include commerce, and the demo has no About or Services page, so you will add those yourself. As with every free Squarespace template, every image and line of copy is a placeholder.

Setup

Kester is free and included with every Squarespace plan, including Personal, though you need Business or above to take payments in the Shop. You choose it when you start a new site, or preview the demo and click to start from it. There is no licence to buy and nothing to install. Squarespace 7.1 does not let you switch templates on an existing site, so if you already have a 7.1 site you would start a fresh trial from Kester and move your content across. Plan for one to three hours to replace the demo content across the five pages, plus time for each case study you add to Work.

Related guide

Browse the templates for designers and templates for artists collections to compare Kester with paid designer templates, or see the full Squarespace templates list. If you are weighing a free Squarespace template against a designer template, read my guide on how to choose the right Squarespace template.