I’m not a fan of orange…
I’m not a fan of the color orange. Dunno why. I prefer soothing and relaxing colors, like blues and greens.
But the new Twenty Thirteen theme for the next version of WordPress is very, very orange.
Since I like to run the default themes over on my other site, this clearly could not stand.
So, I did a palette swap. Basically, I took the three header images, and swapped the Red and Blue channels, leaving the Green channel alone. Easy enough to do in Photoshop.
Then, I made a child theme, and put some minimalist code in the functions.php file to fiddle with the default header images to use the ones from my child theme instead of the normal ones. Finally, I did a search and replace for all the color references in the style.css file, swapped the R and B values in them, then put them in my new style.css file.
The result you can see over on my other blog. Yes, I know I don’t write often enough. Hell, I’ve been busy.
Child themes are fun to mess with. Here’s a copy if you want it for anything.
Enjoy! 
I like the blue way better.
[...] And just in case you don’t like orange, Otto has created a blue version. [...]
I like the orange, but I prefer blue on my own sites, so … I’m using blue too
Can I say that both of these color schemes are awesome?
Great work on blue…and orange!
As a side note, I want to add that the designer of the color scheme for Twenty Thirteen is clearly a genius.
See, I didn’t actually do anything really creative with this. I literally just took the RGB and swapped it around to BGR, both in the header images and in the theme’s CSS colors. That’s literally the only thing this child theme does. The fact that it still works with a simple trick like that really shows how well chosen the color swatch is for the theme. It remains nice and complementary even with a dumb brute-force change like that.
[...] Blue twenty thirteen » [...]
Nice work. The functions.php file also shows how to properly let a child theme override the defaults of the parent theme.
[...] if you’re not a fan of the orange then Otto has a solution – go blue folks, go [...]
Is the theme on this site entirely custom built or is it an altered version of something else?
Pretty sure I found it. http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/fluid-blue Thanks for all of the good info on this site.
[...] up and slap a new theme on the site as well. I’m using a Twenty Thirteen child theme by Otto with a few [...]
Did they not include a couple of colors to choose from?
Nope. Just the one scheme. But we suspect that many people will do what Otto has done and release alternate schemes! It’s great to see people playing with color.
Hi Otto,
Why did you added border (border-left and border-right) on
.site?It causing horizontal scroll to appear, in some cases. If horizontal scroll bar doesn’t appear, you can still scroll left (click scroll button on mouse and push it to left and left), you’ll notice it.
It’s better to remove these two properties.
The child theme needs some updating for the latest changes to the theme.
However, I didn’t “add” the border to .site. That border was there in the version of the theme I was working from. All the rules in the child theme come from the parent theme originally, I simply copied all rules that had colors associated with them.