The Default Themes
The built in themes that ship with wordpress are pretty good starting points for a custom theme. They are well documented and built to show the full functionality of wordpress itself.
Basic Clean Themes
- A starter theme called _s, or underscores meant for hacking.
- The slightly older Toolbox theme is clean with a little bit of structure.
- Quark is a basic responsive custom theme.
- Handcrafted wordpress starter theme
- Roots with HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, Grunt, and Bower.
- Bones is an HTML5, Mobile-First starter theme for rapid WordPress development.
Framework Specific Starter Themes
- The Message Theme from madeforghost.com is built on Pure. Direct download link posted here.
- FoundationPress is a starter-theme for WordPress built with Foundation 5.
- WP-Bootstrap gets you Bootstrapin a WordPress Theme.