Colours, themes and type

Themes

Appearance offers six: Editorial, Terminal, Gallery, Warm, Bold and Minimal. Each changes the palette, the typeface, how tight the spacing is and how round the corners are — together, in light and dark. They are complete looks rather than colour swaps.

What a theme does not do is rearrange your page. That comes from which blocks you put on it, and in what order.

Pick a theme and then change anything you like on top of it. Your change always wins; anything you leave alone follows the theme. So switching theme later never throws away a colour you chose deliberately.

Colours

You pick a small number of colours rather than every colour, and the rest are worked out from them. That is deliberate: the fastest way to make a site look amateur is fourteen colours that nearly match.

Why it is hard to make it unreadable

Two things stop you, and the first does most of the work.

Colours are derived and clamped. You choose a background and an accent; every text, border and link colour is worked out from them and held to a readable contrast before it is drawn. So a bad choice is usually corrected rather than rejected, and you may never notice it happened.

Publishing checks what is left. A combination the clamping cannot rescue is refused rather than warned about, and the message names the two colours and says how far off they are. This is the backstop, not the main defence.

The mistake both exist for is a pale accent on a pale background — which looks fine to the person who chose it on a good monitor in a bright room, and is invisible to a reader on a phone outdoors.

Type

Two typefaces: one for headings, one for body text. Choose from the list. Long text is held to a comfortable line length automatically, whatever the screen.