Customizing Forever: Prada for Breakfast

Think you need to be a graphic designer or buy a bunch of upgrades to make a sweet-looking, custom blog? Think again: Prada for Breakfast stands out from the other 214,699 blogs using the Forever theme with creative use of text and simple tweaks that are accessible to any blogger:

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.)

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