Each yr we release an annual flagship theme as a clean canvas for bloggers, artists, professionals, and enterprise house owners. This yr’s creation, Twenty Sixteen, is a beautiful theme that celebrates a basic WordPress format but injects it with new power and exact, minimalist flare.
Twenty Sixteen‘s customization choices permit it to help any sort of website — from a standard weblog to knowledgeable net web page. Listed here are 4 websites that caught our eye.
Shakespeare Confidential
A few of you may know blogger John Kelly from his excellent etymology weblog, mashed radish. John has launched into a brand new journey this month. Since 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s demise, he intends to learn the Bard’s complete corpus of performs and poetry by yr’s finish, and chronicle the journey on his weblog.
He selected Twenty Sixteen for this challenge, and the theme’s crisp typography and nods to print tradition work completely together with his matter — take a look at the neat submit intro which provides readers a touch of the publish’s content material (see screenshot above: “In 2016, it’s not the shrew that’s the issue. It’s the taming.”), or the magazine-like pull quotes (under).
A couple of different well-chosen parts, like a clear serif font (Libre Baskerville) and a custom header image based mostly on a well-known Shakespeare etching, come collectively to create an unobtrusive however memorable look.
YINKABOKINNI
A pop of colour, a punchy tagline, strategically positioned social icons: with just some brushstrokes, D.J. and radio presenter Yinka Bokinni has crafted a homepage filled with character.
Yinka, a UK-based music and style lover, hosts a morning present at London’s Rinse FM, and also you sense one thing of that early-morning, big-city vibe within the website’s design, from the surprising pink custom background to the slender sans-serif fonts she makes use of (like Droid Sans Mono within the website’s title).
Yinka has opted for a static front page, however the website’s different sections — her weblog and make contact with information, for instance — together with her different social profiles are all one click on away because of the well-placed custom menu and Social Media Icons Widget.
Lucão
Even in case you don’t learn Portuguese, Brazilian poet Lucão’s weblog is a hymn to the virtues of minimalism — in writing in addition to in design.
Lucão — actual identify Lucas Brandão — has cultivated an enormous viewers on social media, with more than 300,000 followers on Instagram alone. His weblog — the place he gathers all his handwritten, aphorism-length poems — is a cushty hub the place readers can discover his deep archives (he’s been publishing right here for nearly a decade). The black-and-white aesthetic of the poems work particularly properly towards the backdrop of Twenty Sixteen, whose clear strains and give attention to readability let the phrases converse for themselves.
Three Hour Brunch Friend
In our guide, any meals weblog with “brunch” in its identify is already forward of the curve; Patricia, a Toronto, Canada-based food blogger went a number of steps additional and used Twenty Sixteen to create an inviting, shiny area for her recipes.
Patricia’s weblog demonstrates how the theme’s out-of-the-box look, together with its default font and white background, are the right basis for pretty pictures and enjoyable meals writing. She’s added a handful of widgets — an Image Widget to introduce herself, a Categories Widget for straightforward navigation, an Instagram Widget for much more eye sweet — and let the theme (and a profitable custom header image that includes bacon) deal with the remaining. We notably favored how her wider photographs overhang the textual content (see the screenshot to the left), one among Twenty Sixteen‘s signature touches.
Have you ever added your personal tweaks to Twenty Sixteen? Have you ever seen different lovely customizations of the theme? Tell us within the feedback.
Filed beneath: Customization, Design, Themes, WordPress.com 
