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 
Kelly, which was designed by Automattic’s own Kelly Hoffman, is an inviting, fun theme for bloggers of all stripes. Its clean, one-column layout makes it perfect for text-heavy posts, but can be just as ideal for a tumblelog-like stream of images.
With bold featured images, the ability to customize the header and the background, and three widget areas in the site’s footer, you can make it your own with just a few quick tweaks. Here are some examples of the theme’s versatility.
Curated Style, a Toronto-centered fashion blog, makes great use of Kelly‘s out-of-the-box look. The theme’s cursive font in the header injects a stylish playfulness, while the generous white space in the posts makes the images of Toronto’s fashion scene stand out.
The blogger behind Curated Style effortlessly added a few personal touches, like a patterned custom header image, a splash of bright pink in the custom background, and an easy-to-navigate custom menu.
Created by a photoblogger based in the Southeast (of the US), The Lens Less Traveled shows how radically different Kelly can look with just a few small changes.
The site uses a more neutral palette than the theme’s trademark bright greens and pinks, as well as a serif custom font instead of the default cursive. The focus is squarely on the gorgeous photography, like the picture above, taken in a state park in Georgia. The splashy featured image in each post creates a particularly striking effect, drawing viewers in and enticing them to explore more.
Taking Kelly in a very different direction than its default design, Italian software developer and entrepreneur Lorenzo Setale recognized the theme’s inherent strengths, and used them to create a tailor-made look for his site.
The dark background and sans serif font join forces to become a modern, clean canvas for Lorenzo’s thoughts, while the theme’s original focus on readability and balance stay as effective as ever.
Have you customized Kelly as well? Is there another theme you’d like to see featured in this series? We’d love to hear your input!
Filed under:
Customization,
Themes 
In our Early Theme Adopters series, we focus on bloggers creating great-looking sites with the most recent additions to our Theme Showcase. Today, let’s visit some of the sites that are already using Hemingway Rewritten, a free theme that makes both words and images shine.
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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