More Custom Headers, Color Schemes, & Theme Improvements
We want everyone on WordPress.com to be able to find the best theme possible for their blog. Something beautiful, amazing, and cool. A theme that makes you want to jump up, run your laptop next door, and show your neighbor your awesome blog. That’s why we love bringing you so many new themes, why we have over 150 themes for you to choose from, and why we have even more on the way. It’s also why every day you let us know different ways we could make all our existing themes just a little bit better. You contact us in support, add your suggestions in the forums, comment here, and — of course! — blog about it.
Because of all that we took as many of those little bits as we could and made our incredible collection of 150-plus themes even better for you.
More Custom Headers and More Color Schemes
We know how much you love customizing your themes and making them your own so we made sure that our best, our most popular, and our most beautiful themes let you do just that. The Custom Header Image feature lets you quickly add your own personal stamp on a theme. We went and added it to themes missing it that could really use it and use it well. You’ll now find that it’s available in themes like Notepad, Titan, Simpla, Grid Focus, and Chaos Theory.
And if you’re using the Modularity Lite theme, Inuit Types, Spectrum, Bouquet, or Vigilance you have new bonus color schemes to choose from. Coraline alone got five brand new color schemes!
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- Coraline Pink
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- Vigilance Dark
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- Inuit Types White on White
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- Modularity Lite Light
Make sure you try out all the new design possibilities these color schemes bring to Custom Design.
Even More Theme Improvements
There were even more theme improvements. They were slightly smaller but good things come in small packages. Things like improving the custom header feature in our most popular theme, Twenty Ten. You can now change your header text color or even hide it altogether with a visit to Appearance → Themes and just a few clicks.
Sometimes less can be more
We also added Post Format support to the Spectrum theme. There are more customization options in the Structure theme, Misty Look, and Fruit Shake. Ocean Mist has customizable Featured Images for each post’s header image. Our most popular themes now have better comment labeling when comments are turned off and better author highlighting for multiple author blogs — making them perfect for blogs that are more like small business sites or magazines. And — and there are even more theme improvements that were done. Too many to list here!
We’ll keep on bringing you new themes. Keep on letting us know what you’d like to see improved with them. 
Nov 21st at 7:27 pm
It is great that you are not only offering new Themes, but making the old ones more flexible. Thanks!
Nov 21st at 7:33 pm
A big fan of customization here, and very happy to see these updates! I recently switched to NotesIL for my writing advice blog and am very pleased with it and its wide array of color options. I used to have Mystique – it went with my science fiction and fantasy genres well – but wanted something simpler.
Nov 21st at 7:40 pm
Wow this is good news!
Nov 21st at 7:49 pm
Custom headers should be on every theme – they’re great.
Nov 21st at 7:56 pm
This is fabulous! I really appreciate how you keep fine-tuning to bring everything to new levels of excellence. There’s a lot to explore here on these upgrades themes. Can’t wait!
Nov 21st at 8:01 pm
It would be AMAZING if not only the background, but also the text field background colour could be changed (I know you can probably do that with custom CSS but for the not so tech-y people it would be great to have that option.)
I’d love a slightly brighter text field on my site.
Nov 21st at 8:06 pm
Thanks again for your great suggestions and improvements. You’re the best!
Nov 21st at 8:13 pm
You continue to wow us all … and I have LITERALLY shared with my neighbor how super-cool my blog looks thanks to the skills of your remarkable team!
Nov 21st at 8:40 pm
I absolutely LOVE WordPress! And this is GREAT news!! I’ll start tinkering with it tonight…. or real soon!! Sooo cool!! You guys are GREAT!!! You really give us the Options!! So important!!
Nov 21st at 9:27 pm
I really like these updates. Keep up the good work! I’m glad that Modularity Lite has an other option for color.
Nov 21st at 10:28 pm
Very nice.
Nov 21st at 10:58 pm
Great, more love to WordPress.
Nov 21st at 11:11 pm
Thanks so much of thinking to do this. Flexibility and the ability to customise is always appreciated. I will definitely check it out!
Nov 22nd at 12:13 am
Awesome, great to hear
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Nov 22nd at 12:50 am
Thanks. This is great news. I have a fairly new theme, Linen. It desperately needs customizable social media icons. I can’t even change the stock ones using css, not even the color … and they don’t match the look of my blog at all. I love what you do, but that’s an improvement I’d REALLY LOVE to see. : )
Nov 22nd at 12:55 am
Thanks for the improvements. It would be nice if all themes had a custom header option.
Nov 22nd at 1:44 am
I use Wu Wei, and I really like it, except for one aspect. Several readers have told me that they couldn’t figure out how to leave a comment because my format just has the “conversation bubble” rather than the word “Comments”. They had to write me an email so I could tell them where to look. I’d love to have the option to change that item.
Nov 22nd at 1:45 am
Now I am spoiled for choice!! Thanks!
Nov 22nd at 2:26 am
Great idea!
Nov 22nd at 2:39 am
Great news for me since I keep changing the theme for my main blog [so that it looks 'forever Fresh'] which has nearly 180,000 hits . I am looking forward to the day when I can use widgets and posts with Java script etc with the theme.
Nov 22nd at 3:11 am
Sometimes, less is more. So true.
Keep up the great work.
Nov 22nd at 3:13 am
Now I can put a custom header onto my secondary site, using Notepad. This makes me happy.
Nov 22nd at 3:35 am
I hope Nishita gets more customization options in the future! I do love that theme!
Nov 22nd at 3:50 am
The ability to have more colors is a big deal with themes. I look almost everyday on WordPress.com to see if there are improvements or new themes. I even look on the weekends even though it’s a given that there probably are not new themes or development announcements on the weekend.
Nov 22nd at 4:07 am
Theme upgrades mean exciting new possibilities. Thanks for the fabulous selection of beautiful themes with a wide variety of features and customizable options. I’m always interested to see what your creative team will present us with next.
Nov 22nd at 5:00 am
Fantastic! Can’t wait to try these customizations out soon.
Nov 22nd at 5:21 am
This is awesome, I’ve been hoping you guys would update the older themes soon and you did.
Nov 22nd at 5:49 am
This is so Fab!
Now I have more themes to choose from.
Nov 22nd at 7:50 am
Thanks for all these amazing improvements!
Nov 22nd at 8:21 am
I like those improvements to old themes. This is a good idea.
Nov 22nd at 12:15 pm
AGREED — I’m delighted that the existing themes are being made more flexible. WISH LIST — (1) that we would get to adjust the sizes of header images. I’ve often wanted to have a header image that takes up less vertical space on the page. (2) that we get a feature allowing us to have two different side widget configurations, and a button that allows us to choose which one goes to which posts and pages.
Nov 22nd at 1:48 pm
I love reading the updates too! I would love to see a way to make my homepage on Twenty-Eleven only show a preview of the most recent posts instead of the whole post. My posts can be a little wordy.
Nov 22nd at 2:50 pm
Thanks for listening WordPress!
Nov 22nd at 2:52 pm
Thanks again for your great suggestions and improvements.
Nov 22nd at 3:25 pm
Cool! I especially love the idea of a custom header for the Notepad theme. But one problem about it is that having too many pages breaks the theme… Oh well, I guess the solution is to have less pages!
Nov 22nd at 3:58 pm
Yep!
We’ll have more free magazine-like themes coming soon.
Nov 23rd at 12:33 am
I am very impressed with the loads of themes. And more impressed with those people behind it. Each theme shows character. Thumbs up.
Nov 23rd at 12:48 am
WordPress is awesome.
Nov 23rd at 5:27 am
WordPress.com users might not appreciate just how much work has to go into maintaining all these themes to keep up with updates to WordPress core, quite aside from these more obvious changes. On a self-hosted site today, I was about to bid farewell to a theme I liked because it was so out-dated: Day Dream, by Jim Whimpey, from way back in 2006. Then I remembered that y’all had it here, checked in Dreamhost’s one-click-install theme library, and sure enough: there was the wp.com version with all the code updated! Yay!
Nov 23rd at 12:06 pm
Can’t wait to try these.Thanks!
Nov 23rd at 12:11 pm
Since you guys are so great not just listening, but coming through, here’s my wish list: custom header and more color schemes for choco!
Nov 23rd at 12:17 pm
Oh – I’ve just re-read this and have seen that you’ve now got a light version of Modularity Lite! That’s wonderful!! I gave up on that theme because I couldn’t read the pale text against a dark background! Brill!
Nov 23rd at 4:05 pm
All comments are great but I still did not find an ideal theme yet.
Nov 24th at 3:51 pm
Stay tuned to the blog here. I’m sure one day we’ll announce one that works out for you!
Nov 23rd at 8:48 pm
I would really love it if the default text color was black or a very dark gray. Some of my older readers – and I – have a lot of trouble reading gray text. To get around this, I’ve been manually changing every article page to black.
Nov 24th at 3:53 pm
If you’re up for experimenting with CSS this is something you can accomplish with the Custom Design Upgrade.
Nov 24th at 11:59 pm
Oh some useful info here, thank you.
Nov 25th at 6:06 am
More themes + more customizations = more awesome WordPress!
Nov 25th at 7:28 pm
great news! a custom header image, even a small icon to personalize DePo Masthead would be great news too..!!! pelase please add it!
thx
Nov 26th at 4:42 pm
I wish we could change the fonts without having to pay! I hate that most themes use Times New Roman or a font like it!
Nov 27th at 11:14 am
Very nice to have something that can be distributed to others and could be useful for them … thank you
Nov 27th at 12:38 pm
+1 to Dave Bonta’s comments. WP.com is a service that does cost money to run. A lot of people work for a company that gives a great (and largely free) blogging platform to so many users. Good job, gang.
Nov 29th at 2:23 pm
The more themes an possibilities, the merrier and the better
Dec 1st at 3:10 pm
Thank you WordPress. I really like this platform. I have started to use WordPress and I think that only the sky is the limite.
Cheers
Dec 1st at 9:17 pm
cool news !!!