Twenty Twenty Theme Review – The Positives
Twenty Twenty has a few unique features that make it stand out. It’s not just a basic theme with no substance; while it may look minimalistic on the outside, there are some interesting features buried in the code. This includes its variable font and automatic color contrast.
Flexible Design
One big plus of Twenty Twenty is that its clean design offers unlimited potential. The theme is suitable for just about any kind of website. Blogs and news sites will look best with the focused, centered layout, but it could also reasonably power a portfolio, a business site, or anything you can think of.
The theme’s design is simple, but bold and universally appealing, and this makes it a great starter template. No matter what kind of project you’re trying to create, whether a small static website or something far more complex, Twenty Twenty’s simplicity makes it suitable. That’s why it’s a great default theme for WordPress users.
Readability, Accessibility, and Responsiveness
These days, themes can’t just be pretty on the surface. They also need to be readable, responsive, and accessible.
Too many people design with flashy animations and bright colors without stopping to consider if their site is actually easy to read. Poor font and color choices will contribute to a higher bounce rate. This is especially true for vision impaired users where a lack of readability is intolerable.
You could spend a long time working with other themes to carefully audit how accessible your background’s color contrast is. Or, you could use Twenty Twenty, where all this is already figured out for you.
Cleaner designs lend themselves better to readability and accessibility, and as already mentioned, this theme is all about minimalism. But it’s not just that: its font’s main focus is readability, and it’s very pleasant on the eyes. Even at very small sizes the typeface still looks sharp.
Variable Fonts
Twenty Twenty comes with Inter, which uses new and experimental variable font technology. These fonts are built off of the OpenType font format, which brings greater customization to web fonts.
Variable fonts allow you to adjust line width, boldness, and other minute aspects of its appearance using CSS. But it all resides in a single font file, reducing space and allowing you get more diversity out of just one typeface. Inter’s website has a demo you can play with to see for yourself.
Works Well with Gutenberg
Many themes even now don’t play well with the block editor. Some simply haven’t seen an update since before the removal of the classic editor, while other theme creators just don’t bother making it work nicely with its successor.
With Twenty Twenty, you don’t have to worry about that, as the entire point of the theme is giving you a sandbox to play with Gutenberg. It supports the full width alignment option and every other block in the editor with no strange display issues. Plus, as mentioned, you can see what it will look like right in the back end.
Great Base Theme to Build On
Twenty Twenty’s purpose isn’t to provide you with a pre-decorated theme that already looks gorgeous with minimal tweaking. While its simplicity may be appealing to many, it admittedly does take some work to make it yours.
However, that just isn’t its purpose. Twenty Twenty aims to provide you with a template to experiment with, a simple base that gives you something to work off of without having to code an entire theme from scratch. In addition, it’s an uncomplicated default theme for new users to get the hang of WordPress with.
