Today let’s take a look at Beau and Arrow Events, a wedding inspiration blog run by Ellen and Kate, two San Diego-based event planners. You’d never know that this chic blogazine is running on Comet, one of our sparest themes.

Here’s how the bloggers behind Beau and Arrow Events transformed grayscale Comet into cursive and gold elegance. It’s nothing any intrepid blogger couldn’t try at home!

A cohesive color scheme

Like any well-planned wedding, Beau and Arrow Events picked a handful of theme colors and stuck to them. In this case, blush and gold accents temper plain black and white.

The bloggers opted for a busy backdrop with a pink-and-white arrow pattern, but keep it from commandeering the design by not repeating it anywhere else. In fact, the backdrop is the only space pink appears in the color scheme. Elsewhere, like on container borders and links, the bloggers chose gold as their sole accent. The effect is a perfectly balanced duochrome.

To learn more about personalizing your blog with custom colors, view the tutorial.

Typefaces that brim with personality

On Beau and Arrow Events, the bloggers made bold font choices that hold their own with their featured wedding photography. You’ll notice that their custom header image isn’t a logo at all, but a medley of complementary fonts. The effect is an elegant, feminine vibe that caters perfectly to the blog’s wedding-planning audience. To continue this theme throughout the page, Ellen and Kate chose flirty Fertigo Pro Script for headers, and the classic serif Skolar for a readable body text. A smaller, caps-lock version of Fertigo creates notice-me sidebar titles.

If you’re interested in reading more about how you can personalize your blog with custom typefaces, yes, there’s a tutorial for that, too!

Custom bullet points enhance the sidebar

Ellen and Kate maintain consistency in their design by carrying over the ampersand in their custom header image to the bullet points on the sidebar. They’re able to do this by setting a custom image in place of the regular black dot for bullet points that typically mark unordered lists.

You can dive into your CSS to have more control and customize your site the way you want — to make a variety of tweaks, such as setting a custom image for an unordered list, like Ellen and Kate do here. In order to edit the CSS, they use the $30 Custom Design Upgrade and a small ampersand image.

Here’s how to make your own custom bullets:

• Create and upload a small image, which we’ll call custom.jpg, to your Media Library.
• In the Customizer, navigate to the CSS button on the lower right side.
• Now, you’ll want to roll up your sleeves and do a little coding! In CSS lingo, “ul” is how we refer to an unordered, or bulleted, list. To change the icon that shows up as the bullet, we’ll want to specify a “list-style-image” property that affects that “ul.” Finally, we’ll need to specify a URL where this image lives. Since it’s in your Media Library, it lives at custom.jpg.
• Now we need to put the above information into syntax browsers can read. It’s OK if you don’t understand exactly why it’s worded this way, just know that it’s the same information we outlined above. Add a line that looks like this anywhere in the Customizer editing window:

ul { list-style-image: url(‘custom.jpg’); }

• Save and refresh, et voila! — you should see a heart, star, or whichever custom image you picked in place of the ordinary bullet point.

You can do much more with custom CSS to make these types of design tweaks — for more, check out our support page on custom CSS.

What kinds of awesome things do you do at Automattic?

Philip Arthur Moore

I’m currently the Premium Theme Team lead at WordPress.com. The majority of my waking hours are spent feverishly obsessing over making premium themes a world-class experience for all WordPress users. This means a lot of different things: ensuring that customers are well-supported in our premium themes forum; auditing every single line of code in every premium theme; educating the WordPress theming community on proper approaches to WordPress theme development; and with my colleagues coming up with strong, robust guidelines for developing themes the WordPress.com way.

One of the more exciting parts of my job is being able to partner and work very closely with premium WordPress theme shops like Graph Paper Press, The Theme Foundry, Press75, and Organic Themes to bring some of the best WordPress.org themes onto WordPress.com for our users’ delight. In many ways I feel like not only do I have Automatticians as coworkers but partner theme shops as well. Many a long night has been spent prepping premium themes for their launches, none of which would have been possible without solid, thriving relationships with our partners. In short, premium themes are my life right now.

Tell us about a project you’ve worked on recently.

My favorite ongoing project is _s, or Underscores. It’s a starter theme on which every single Automattic premium theme is built and it was created to both help us do our jobs better and educate the WordPress community on theming best practices. I actively contribute to the project primarily because I strongly believe in developer education and Open Source. It also doesn’t hurt that I get to play with git and GitHub, which is one of my favorite companies in existence.

It’s hard to understand the power of _s unless you see what’s built with it. Further, Ryu, A Simpler Time, and Untitled were all created using _s, but you’d never know it without being told and that’s what makes the starter theme so powerful. To date, Underscores has around 34 total contributors and it’s always open to more. I’ll continue to work on it because it provides a solid benchmark on which to grade other themes and it also gives me a chance to interact with the theming community. 

What have you learned that you can share with WordPress.com users?

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in life is that writing will take you everywhere. It doesn’t matter what occupation you hold or what you study, writing will take you far. If you are a new blogger who doesn’t know what to write about, just write; it’ll come to you. If you form the habit of blogging daily or weekly and stick to it, you’ll find your voice in no time and you’ll thank yourself for slogging through the days when writing didn’t feel so great. Keep at it and don’t stop, and a year from now you’ll be thankful your fingers kept tapping on your keyboard.

Philip with volunteers and fellow Automattician Naoko at WordCamp Seoul 2013

What do you enjoy most about your job?

Without a doubt what I appreciate most at Automattic is the level of confidence that my colleagues and I have for each other to be the best in the world at what we do. We push each other to grow and learn, rarely — if ever — accept the status quo, and always think about how to make things better. We’re managers of one who rely on trust and sound judgment to guide our collective ship; it truly is a pleasure working with a company filled with so many independent thinkers who care most about pushing the needle forward day by day.

It also feels incredible to know hundreds of other like-minded individuals spread throughout the world who are firmly united by the goal of making the web a better place. I’m not alone in my love for WordPress and an open web and being virtually surrounded by others who share the same views really is something special.

What do you love to do in your spare time?

Spare time will almost always consist of one, or any combination of the following:

1. Reading up on fellow Third Culture Kids, Third Culture Adults, and Global Nomads. I’ve lived mostly outside of my birth country (the US) for the last decade and connect best with expats and mobile souls.
2. Watching Seinfeld episodes for the umpteenth time. George is getting upset!!!
3. Digging deeper and deeper into the Spotify rabbit hole to find smooth chillout and lounge tunes.
4. Making a concerted effort to call my family and best friends on the phone to tell them that I miss them and love them very much. The art of long, rambling phone conversations must live on.
5. Finding out where the best dark chocolate is located in the world and dreaming of those places in my sleep. If it’s less than 85% dark let’s not talk.
6. Reading books on Buddhism and living a mindful life. It passes by so quickly so let’s make it a good one!
7. Figuring out how to randomly interject emoticons into online conversations.
   (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
8. Taking public transportation in large cities. Tokyo’s rail system is the tops.
9. Walking nowhere in particular.

Did you know Automattic is hiring? We want people who are willing to work hard, share their ideas, learn from their colleagues, take initiative to get things done without being told, and those who aren’t afraid to ask questions. Think you fit the bill? Work with us.

To start, here are Sight and distraction no. 99, side by side:

Nova’s customization makes a big splash

As a professional writer, Nova’s blog connects her to both her readers and fellow writers. She sets the tone right away, by using a custom header and custom background. Nova also uses two of Sight’s most compelling options to great effect: the featured image slider and both of the available custom menus.

Nova’s custom header spells out clearly that you’re reading the blog of a young adult author. The bold, clean black/white/red color scheme and overall look complements her background nicely:

Nova’s chosen “Dreaming of Stardust” as her custom background, giving an ethereal look to the blog that mimics the feeling of her books’ covers. Think about how your own background and header play off of each other. Together, do they create a look that represents your personality?

Next, Nova uses Sight’s image slider option, allowing her to present the content she most wants readers to encounter, in a professional, magazine-like way. This is an easy way to add movement to Sight, and is a snap to deploy. Nova simply marked the posts as “sticky,” and made sure each one had a featured image. Sight will display up to 30 of your latest sticky posts this way, giving you lots of flexibility.

Nova also uses multiple custom menus. Notice the two menus in the header photo above? There’s the horizontal one running underneath the header, which is her blog’s primary navigation. But she’s also chosen to use the secondary menu option in the header itself, right up near the search bar. Here Nova’s added some custom links, using this high-profile spot to draw your attention to her personal website, as well as offer more information on two of her books:

A sidebar that just won’t stop

We’d be remiss if we didn’t also point out how effectively Nova uses her sidebar. There’s not an inch of wasted space here.

Nova shares information on herself, her work, her book reviews, her appearances, and more, carving out room in the sidebar to keep all of this important stuff in one place.

Nova’s About.me widget makes a strong impression. Notice how effective it is, providing a quick bio and multiple platforms for following and interacting with Nova. You’ll also see a text widget below it, sharing her “upcoming appearances.”

At the very top of her sidebar, Nova showcases her most recently published book with an image widget that links to her personal website using a photo of the cover. Just underneath this, she cleverly uses a text widget to provide a summary of the book’s plot, along with several quotes from book reviews.

A final point about Nova’s sidebar: she’s chosen the order of her widgets with care. This isn’t some hodgepodge mix. She’s got her most vital stuff — her recent book, her appearances, herself — right up top, where you can’t miss them. Nova employs lots of other widgets as you scroll down her sidebar (recent posts, recent comments, Twitter, and a tag cloud, to name a few), but it’s no accident they are where they are.

Consider your intended outcomes with your own blog. What’s important to you? What do you want people to see first? As you think about which widgets to use to pull off your vision, don’t forget to spend some time on their order, too.

Want more help exploring all the possibilities in widgets? Try this trio of posts from The Daily Post:

• Widgets 101
• Widgets 201
• Widgets 301

All the sweet customization goodies

Finally, Nova adds one more layer of customization to her blog with custom fonts and custom colors, as part of the Custom Design upgrade. For just $30 a year, she’s able to pick fonts that are different for each part of her site, but work together overall for a consistent look. And with the custom colors she’s chosen, her entire site is tied together, top to bottom.

distraction no. 99′s custom fonts:

distraction no. 99′s custom colors, with a snippet of her background:

WordPress makes it easy for you to play around with different custom font and color options, before you even decide to purchase the upgrade. Check out these two great articles to learn how, and to see more examples of blogs using custom fonts and colors:

• Personalize Your Site with Custom Fonts
• Personalize Your Site with Custom Colors

First up is Newsworthy by WP Themes, a brightly-hued theme designed for news, magazine, and personal blogs. Its striking colors are sure to grab your readers’ attention at first glance! Newsworthy supports multiple authors, post formats, widgets, custom colors, and custom headers.

Check out Newsworthy on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site by going to Appearance → Themes.

Next is Visual, a dark, elegant grid theme by Devin Price. The responsive layout allows for a seamless user experience across all screen sizes, and the clean, subdued design makes it perfect for putting your art or photography front-and-center.

Read more about Visual on the Theme Showcase, or activate it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes.

Forever was originally designed as a wedding theme, but the bold images, simple layout, and clean typography make it suitable for any kind of blog, including an art and style site like Prada for Breakfast. There’s nothing matrimonial about Halie’s site, and here’s why:

Custom header and background

Forever is one of the many themes that lets you upload a custom header, which is a great way to instantly grab a visitor’s attention and show off your blog’s personality. Some bloggers opt for graphically designed headers (like Mi Piace Kate, previously highlighted in Customizing Bueno), but a custom header can be as simple as a favorite photo or a bit of text. Prada for Breakfast uses some of both:

The photo she’s chosen — of coffee, a croissant, and the morning papers, slightly soft and faded — transports the reader to a Parisian café on a misty day, where you sip a latté while watching the well-heeled stroll by. If the photo doesn’t whisk you off to France, she’s superimposed her title and tagline above, both of which reinforce that you’re reading a style blog.

Halie’s custom header is paired with a custom background of pink and off-white stripes, simultaneously calming and whimsical. Adding a background is as easy as finding a image or pattern you like and hitting “upload.” The internet is your oyster here; take a screen shot of the pattern of a fabric you like or find a photo using Creative Commons, and presto! Background.

She — and you — can also choose any of the background patterns that come already loaded in WordPress.com, which you’ll find in the Customizer. (Check out our other suggested sources for background patterns and textures for more inspiration.)

Bold tagline

One of Forever’s distinct features is the way it features the blog’s tagline separately from the title, almost like a call-out:

Prada for Breakfast takes advantage of this feature, using it to highlight a favorite quote:

It doesn’t involve any design or custom fonts. Halie just edited her general settings to set this quote as the tagline, and the theme does the rest. The quote instantly sets a tone for the blog (and looks great, to boot).

Customized widgets

Prada for Breakfast makes excellent use of widgets to highlight recent posts, tweets, an extensive blogroll, and more, using small custom touches to help them blend with her blog and add their own personality:

• Widget titles are all customized to reflect her tone: “Hello” instead of “About;” “Reading List” instead of “Links;” “Follow Me!” for social media links.
• Social media links are done with image widgets, but here, the images are just text saved as pictures — something you can do in most word processing programs. There are no custom graphics, no cute-little-blue-bird-on-a-branch, just an elegant font that melds with the rest of the blog.

Nearly everything Halie at Prada for Breakfast does to create her stylish yet dreamy blog is done with simple text edits and basic tools available to everyone on WordPress.com — no technical or design know-how needed. And as an added bonus, this is a reminder not to skip over themes originally created for a specific purpose; you can easily transform a wedding or restaurant theme into your dream site.

(For more inspiration, check out the Branding Your Blog or Custom Backgrounds posts over on The Daily Post for help developing and implementing a cohesive look for your blog.)

Meet Bon Vivant.

Bon Vivant

Bon Vivant is a quirky restaurant-oriented theme designed by Denise Chandler. With a unique custom header information area, food menus support, Open Table registration widget, and a prominent space for your business’ phone number, Bon Vivant is the perfect choice for your café or food-themed blog.

Read more about Bon Vivant on the Theme Showcase, or activate it for your restaurant under Appearance → Themes!

Next up: SemPress.

SemPress

Designed by Matthias Pfefferle. SemPress is an extremely lightweight, responsive theme designed to show off your posts, quotes, and images.

Read more about SemPress on the Theme Showcase or activate it today under Appearance → Themes.

Last but not least is another ‘press’ theme, BonPress.

BonPress Front Page

BonPress is a traditional, simple, and responsive theme ideal for individual bloggers. Designed by WPZOOM. It features Custom Menus, five Post Formats, and the ability to add a Custom Background, to make your blog posts even more beautiful.

Read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Truly Minimal

Truly Minimal, designed by FlareThemes, lives up to its name for its clean typography and elegant simplicity. The theme includes three sidebar placement options, support for multiple post formats, and a responsive design for small screens and mobile devices. It’s an excellent choice for showcasing your writing, promoting your business, or for anyone who wants a crisp, modern look for their site.

Read more about Truly Minimal on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site by going to Appearance -> Themes!

First up is Little Story, a premium theme with design elements and inspiration from the talented Laura Amiss.

Little Story supports several post formats in different styles, large featured images on Sticky posts, a mobile-friendly layout (including a collapsible footer widget area), social network icons for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and an option to add author information after single posts. It’s the perfect choice for a design or craft blog, or for sharing your own stories and tales.

Read more about Little Story on the Theme Showcase, or preview it on your site under Appearance -> Themes!

Next up is a clean, professional blog theme from the fine folks at WooThemes called Scrollider Express. This theme comes loaded with features including post formats, responsive layout, and featured images. Added to this is a unique header image design that spans the full width of the homepage and presents a bit of a surprise as you scroll down the screen.

Read more about Scrollider Express on the Theme Showcase, or preview it on your site under Appearance → Themes.

Last but not least, we have Pachyderm, a free theme that supports all post formats, an optional widget area, and what theme wouldn’t be complete without a pink elephant? With its clean, playful design, it would be perfect for a baby or family blog, or for sharing your web finds on a tumblelog.

Read more about Pachyderm on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site by going to Appearance -> Themes.

Say ciao to Mi Piace Kate:

“Mi Piace Kate” is Italian for “I Like Kate,” and we definitely do! Kate’s a graphic designer, cat aficionado, and handcrafting devotee who’s taken the free Bueno theme and run with it. Her blog is a stellar example of how some custom images and a $30 Custom Design upgrade can change a free theme into a million-dollar site that’s totally unique.

Take a look at the standard Bueno home page next to Kate’s:

If you didn’t notice the post date in the colored circle (pink in the original; chartreuse in Kate’s update), you might never know that this blog used Bueno. How did she pull it off? Here are a few of her (not-so-secret) techniques:

Custom header

Kate sets the tone with a custom header that both tells the reader a bit about her and the blog and sets the tone design- and color-wise:

Uploading a custom header doesn’t require an upgrade; it’s an option for any Bueno blogger (and for tons of other themes, too — 152, to be exact).

Thinking, “But I’m not a graphic designer”? You don’t need to be! Create some simple text in your word processing program of choice and save it as an image, or use a favorite photo that has meaning for you. Voilà! Instant personality.

Custom colors

Kate takes the colors introduced in the header and weaves them throughout the site, from the colored circle around the post date to the lines under her widget titles. She’s doing this via the Custom Design upgrade, which lets her pick the exact shades she loves and use CSS to apply them specifically where she’d like.

If you’re not loving the stock Bueno pink but the idea of CSS gives you the heebie-jeebies, we’ve got you covered: Bueno comes with seven different color schemes you can activate with a click by heading to Appearance → Theme Options, and you can use the Custom Design upgrade to change the colors of fonts and backgrounds even more, no CSS necessary. (If you want to dip your toe into the CSS pool, here’s a primer.)

Custom fonts

The bold fonts are what draw a lot of you to Bueno in the first place, but if you’re digging the Bueno layout and would like a different font look, the Custom Design upgrade lets you do that. On Mi Piace Kate, Kate’s opted to use the classic serif font Ambroise for headers and post titles, easy-to-read Museo Sans for regular post text, and the slender and elegant Raleway for titles and menu options. If you’re interested in exploring custom fonts, check out how a few other bloggers are using them and learn how to preview them for your own site.

Fun with text widgets

Kate wasn’t afraid to get under the hood and wrangle her widgets to get the exact look she wanted. Check out how she’s styled her blogroll, right. She’s changed it from a simple one-blog-per-line list to something with a different kind of visual interest that gels with the clean but playful look she uses across the blog.

How’d she do it? By using a Text widget rather than the Links widget most of us use for blogrolls. Since text widgets accept basic HTML, she was able to drop all her links into a widget, separating each with a double backslash. Her custom fonts and colors took care of the rest.

Kate kicks off her sidebar with one of our favorite but underused widgets — a basic text widget with some “about” copy. Again, the widget pulls in all her customizations: colors, text, and CSS, so it’s providing information and context for new visitors to her site while reinforcing the Mi Piace Kate brand.

She’s also customized her widget titles, another of our favorite tweaks: “Links” becomes “I Like to Look,” and “About” becomes “Oh Hello.” No opportunity to inject personality into the blog is overlooked.

(For more on customizing widgets, check out our recent tutorials on working with text widgets and three free ways to customize your blog.)

Kate uses a mix of design- and tech-sense to create a blog that screams “Kate!”, but anyone can personalize their site with standard options like custom headers and creatively-used text widgets, or use the basic click-to-activate features of the Custom Design upgrade to go a step further. She’s definitely inspired us, and we hope she’s done the same for you!

POSH

POSH is an “improvisational restaurant” in Scottsdale, Arizona where Chef Josh Herbert creates custom menus for each evening’s crowd based on seasonal ingredients and personal preferences. Using the Confit theme developed especially for restaurants, he’s able to give potential patrons a feel for the restaurant with a custom background photo showcasing the restaurant’s interior while maintaining a clean overall feel.

We particularly like the way he’s loaded up the left sidebar with all the key things a customer wants to see — links to information about the chef and his food, the restaurant’s hours and location, the OpenTable reservations widget — while using the rest of the page as a blog to highlight well-loved recipes.

(And Confit doesn’t have to be just for restaurants — it also works for secret supper clubs, rental properties, and more. Visit the Confit page for instructions on configuring all the restaurant-specific features.)

The Elephant Walk

The Elephant Walk, a popular French-Cambodian restaurant in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a “benefit restaurant” — 3% of its profits go to non-profit organizations dedicated to fighting poverty. Using a customized version of the premium Duet theme, they’re spreading the word about their food and mission.

They’ve souped up their site with a custom header (which they carry over into an image widget, to keep the look consistent), and custom navigation that quickly shepherds readers to menus, FAQs, and information on the non-profits they support. As with POSH, they’ve also kept the most popular information in the sidebar, so readers can get directions or make a reservation no matter which page they’re on when the mood strikes.

Canapé

Friends Matthew and Sean run Canapé, a pop-up restaurant, every Sunday night, taking over an existing restaurant space to present a new 11-course menu. Their site, using a customized version of the free Forever theme, uses stunning close-up photographs of their inventive, refined food to great effect.

Their custom background and header hint at their elegant but playful style, but it’s the slider of featured images that really steals the show — it showcases ten of their perfectly composed dishes, leaving each on the screen just long to activate your Pavlovian response before shifting to the next. Above, a custom menu takes visitors to more information (including a whole page dedicated to food photography, if the slider images weren’t enough for you) while below, blog posts keep followers up to date on upcoming menus and other news.

Some of these sites use premium themes or other upgrades, like a custom domain name or custom design – but not all. The Confit theme is free, as are its options to use a custom background and OpenTable widget. Many other free themes can be customized with a header, slider, and menus, and image widgets are always available for adding more visual interest.

Are you a restaurant owner who needs an upgrade, or just a happy customer whose favorite taco joint has a website from 1997 and wants to help? Welcome to WordPress.com!