Customizing Twenty Fourteen (Take Two!)
Twenty Fourteen is much more than a magazine theme. From blog to small business homepage, Twenty Fourteen does it all — as these four sites show.
Twenty Fourteen is this year’s default theme, and the first magazine-style default theme — something y’all were waiting for, judging by its skyrocketing popularity.
We’ve already looked at how a few early adopters customized it, as well as how some bloggers have stripped it down for a minimalist take. Here are four more great sites powered by your creativity and Twenty Fourteen’s versatility.
champagne&backpacks
Along with its magazine-style layouts, Twenty Fourteen allows you to opt for a simpler homepage that makes one post — and one photo — the star. That’s the layout the duo behind champagne&backpacks chose to give their travelogue some serious punch:
The dark but warm gray background and spare collection of widgets make navigating easy but keep their posts in the spotlight. (Their stunning photos don’t hurt, either!) Swapping Twenty Fourteen’s sans serif fonts for the elegant lines of LTC Bodoni 175 and Minion Pro creates the feel of a sophisticated travel magazine, and pops of pink draw readers’ eyes while injecting fun.
City Cyclery
The proprietors of Windsor, Canada’s City Cyclery looked at the bones of Twenty Fourteen and saw beyond a blog or magazine — they saw their business’ new homepage:
Their imagery instantly lets you know they’re all about bikes. The clean lines of their logo and header are a perfect match for Twenty Fourteen‘s default fonts, and their bright but complementary menu color ensures that visitors focus on the most important element of the page: their navigation.
A Good Sports Hang
The bloggers at A Good Sports Hang chose simple colors and bold lines that mesh with Twenty Fourteen’s magazine-style grid layout, using the theme’s default options to achieve a tailored look:
The lines running across their header do double duty: they echo sports uniforms, then blend right into Twenty Fourteen’s menu, which also relies on horizontal lines. A post grid gives readers an instant sense of the range of topics they cover, and the basic black-and-white palette creates a bold yet readable blog.
Veggies Don’t Bite
One simple change — taking menus, background colors, and accents from dark to light — helps Sophia at Veggies Don’t Bite put her own whimsical spin on this normally neutral theme:
Keeping the color scheme light and bright lets her colorful, hand-drawn header breathe. Fun fonts in the same tones carry the look down the page. Every part of the page reinforces the idea behind her blog: eating fresh foods.
Want to give Twenty Fourteen a spin? Take a look at its details and demo site, or head to Appearance → Themes to preview it on your own blog.
WordPress.com News 
Hi Michelle, I discovered the Twenty Fourteen theme by chance, and we are using it for our TravelBloggers.on.WordPress blog. I’m very pleased with the result, one has a lot of options to customize it. And my favorite feature is the nifty slider on the front page!
http://internationaltravelbloggers.wordpress.com/
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Is it possible to customize this theme to look like 2013/2012? I mean with just blog posts in the front, one after the other without the magazine layout. I guess magazine looks good for blogs that publish images with every post. Most of our blogs are text rich. Hence we want to avoid magazine layout.
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Yes, that’s what champagne&backpacks, the first blog featured here, has chosen — just a list of posts.
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Thanks for your reply. Yes, I saw that yesterday. I have now applied 2014 in my blog – yaaayyyy 😀
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Thanks for the ideas! Might change up my blogs!
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Definitely saw all the perks with twenty fourteen – was my first and is my last choice 🙂
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Hi there ! I love this theme, its perfect for a my concept of a comic series. Its a novel based on personal experiences.
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