blue
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.

Twenty Thirteen – Blue

Enjoy! πŸ™‚

Shortlink:

27 Comments

  1. […] And just in case you don’t like orange, Otto has created a blue version. […]

  2. I like the orange, but I prefer blue on my own sites, so … I’m using blue too πŸ™‚

  3. Can I say that both of these color schemes are awesome? πŸ™‚

    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.

  4. Nice work. The functions.php file also shows how to properly let a child theme override the defaults of the parent theme.

  5. […] if you’re not a fan of the orange then Otto has a solution – go blue folks, go […]

  6. Is the theme on this site entirely custom built or is it an altered version of something else?

  7. […] up and slap a new theme on the site as well. I’m using a Twenty Thirteen child theme by Otto with a few […]

  8. Did they not include a couple of colors to choose from?

  9. 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.

  10. Would be interested in seeing a screenshot sometime if possible? For some reason when I visit Ottodestruct.com I still see the default Orange. Thanks πŸ™‚

    • Yes, I need to update the child theme to take into account recent changes to the twenty-thirteen theme, but I’m waiting until 3.6 is released (along with the theme) before I do so. So I switched it back to the orange for now. WP 3.6 should be available soonish, then I can update it. πŸ™‚

  11. Hello Otto,

    I love twentythirteen, I put it on my site and love it, but there is one thing I didn’t like, ***the comments**, when you reply to a comment you can’t tell which one is a reply and which is the original thread, I can see you change the comments layout with boxes and colors, can you tell me how to do this? You can see my site here, I have over 25,000 comments and it’s a bit difficult to see where a comment begins and who replied to it.

    http://papaesceptico.com/2010/09/la-solucion-homeopatica-al-sobrepeso-homeodimfit-con-chorros-de-evidencia/#comment-33163

    Thanks a lot!!! πŸ˜€

  12. I love the Blue, but I am quite happy with Orange, How about pink too for the girls? πŸ™‚

  13. I love this look. I also like that it displays well on iPads. How did you get the header to not “lop off” because of the fixed 1600 pixel width? Thanks for sharing.

  14. When I was little my favourite colour was orange. So I find it apropos that I when I was looking for a new theme a very orange Twenty Thirteen came along. Although I wanted to make a few changes as well, I wanted a darker theme for my photography. If anyone is looking for a dark version of twenty thirteen check out. R2D2 child theme.

  15. Thank you very much. I changed using this example in pink. Yes, Color are used for the theme of the site, no personal preference.)

  16. Ah, that’s how you made it blue! Thanks for sharing, that’s a really nice way of tweaking the colours.

  17. I really don’t like orange either. Nice to know someone agrees with you for a change.

    I now run this theme myself.

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