Whether you’re a personal blogger, a designer, or an artist, Isola gives you a bright, clean space to showcase your work. Its minimalist design stays crisp across devices and screens of all sizes, with generous white space to keep the focus on your content.
Isola, a free theme, comes with numerous customization options, from featured images and custom header images to sleek post formats. Let’s take a look at three sites that are already using it to great effect.
Leon Scott, who writes thoughtful posts on design and technology on his aptly-named blog, makes the most of Isola‘s out-of-the-box look. He kept the layout simple and clean; all the widgets are tucked into a panel off screen.
Many of Leon’s posts — like the one shown above — include featured images, which establish their tone and also add a welcome burst of color.
The environmentally-conscious blogger who writes at Beyond the Black Mountain focuses on the intersection between fashion and eco-friendly living. Her site’s vibe echoes her approach elsewhere, with a stylish, spare look. A moody custom header image coupled with a retro serif font (Ambroise, which is available with the Custom Design upgrade) personalize Isola even further.
The blogger behind a dimpleate, based in Northern Virginia, has created a photo-heavy lifestyle blog that still maintains an airy, clean feel. She uses Isola‘s image and gallery post formats to highlight the beautiful images, linking them to her Flickr galleries for visitors who wish to explore more of her work.
Have you also customized Isola? Is there another theme you’d like to see featured here? Let us know in the comments.
Filed under:
Customization,
Themes 
Nearly 150 of the themes available to WordPress.com users support post formats, which means that these themes offer a variety of post types (standard, image, gallery, video, audio, quote, and more) that display your content differently based on the format. If your theme supports post formats, you’ll see a Format module as you’re …
A simple way to add visual variety to your site’s front page is to publish your content using Post Formats. Over 50 of our themes support Post Formats, which means they can display various types of content — including images, videos, quotes, links, audio, and short snippets called “asides” — with different formatting, adding subtle but nice touches to your site.
The types of Post Formats you can choose from depends on your theme. To see what Post Formats your current theme supports, go to Posts » Add New in the dashboard and look for a Format module on the right, with various options like the one below:
Using Post Formats is optional — if your theme supports them, you don’t have to use them, since the default (standard) format works well with any content you publish. Using Post Formats is also free: you don’t need to purchase the custom CSS upgrade to enable different Post Formats.
Our Top Themes Now Support Post Formats
Recently, we made our top 25 themes — from popular free themes like Pilcrow, Manifest, and Bueno to premium themes such as Elemin — look even better with Post Formats. Here’s a sampling of how Post Formats look different, using the Elemin theme as an example:
Image Format:
Video Format:
Quote Format:
Link Format:
Audio Format:
Aside Format:
Graphic icons spice up this particular theme, while other themes have different design or textual elements appropriate for their layouts. Browse the themes that support Post Formats in our Theme Showcase.
Start Posting Now
You can publish instantly using popular Post Formats right in your dashboard. Just click on “New Post” on the top right, then select one of these popular formats to publish instantly to one of your sites:
Alternatively, you can go to Posts » Add New in your dashboard to create a new post. Just select the appropriate Post Format in the Format module, and you can use the “Preview” button to view the post before publishing it.
And we all want to be the Tesla of bloggers. We want to be the Tesla of everything. Guess I can be the Tesla of #HappyDonut eaters!
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Just switched to this theme. Love it!
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Beautiful themes! I guess it’s time to think about some changes in my blog’s appearance.
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Me too – love it !
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Excellent theme.
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Very nice theme! The only thing I would change is the size or placement of the custom header. I found it a bit awkward that the header can be so wide but the page contents so much thinner.
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The theme is good, but it will be good to have better font. Or is there any feature, I can change the font?
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Yes — like Beyond the Black Mountain, the blog featured in this post, you can get the Custom Design upgrade, which includes Custom Fonts.
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The theme looks good.
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I love this theme! I just switched yesterday. custom features are cool too. I have been unhappy with some of the free themes of late. They never look anything like the ones advertised even after you try to customise them yourself. This one just took a few clicks and it was done. Beautiful!
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