General design
Flat Magazinews has a super minimalistic style with a decent, classic and clean look. The design is totally based on the straight line and square box. It looks like a magazine with many boxes sticking on it. The content-box style of the body page makes the theme look well-arranged and sleek. The boxes can also avoid messing the content with the background image of the magazine behind.
Other elements
The default color of texts are black, the background of the boxes are white, and background of the magazine is light grey, following the elegant and classic style of this theme.
How about the font type? They give you 2 fonts: Merriweather for heading and Lato for the body content. They are popular font for a website. And these fonts are ensured that your texts are as much easy to read as possible.
There is only 1 style for the header. The website title and tagline lie on the magazine while the header image and menu bar are on an individual box. You can choose an image for the header image. This image appears on every page. If you don’t choose it, only the menu bar is shown like this.
No header image
I highly suggest that you should choose an image to attract the visitor. Moreover, the image you choose keeps the original size, so you should choose a horizontal photograph to make it look nice.
There are 3 widget areas in this theme: sidebar, footer and header widget.
The sidebar is fixed on the right of the page, under the header widget. You can’t do anything to change its layout at all. The only way to hide the sidebar is adding no widget. But it will leave a blank space on the right of the page in every post, looking so empty like this:
No sidebar
Additionally, there is no sticky sidebar and banner here.
The header widgets also on boxes, right on the header image. You have 3 boxes to add all the basic widget. Similarly, there are 3 columns for the footer areas. The footer area is in the black area of the magazine. The long straight line to separate the elements of a column is effective to decorate and emphasize this area, making it less boring.
On the archive post page, all information, feature image, and excerpt are shown. There is only 1 list style. One thing I like about it is that the feature images are displayed in large size. They are a good way to perform the image and attract the reader to the post. The single post page looks straightforward and neat. But I think it should have page navigation or related post to encourage people to read more.
Briefly, there are not many custom sections for the user. But I think the design and arrangement are perfect for the reading purpose and minimalistic style.
Responsive
I believe that the user probably doesn’t use only 1 kind of device so the ability to be responsive is very important. I tested this theme on my laptop, PC, tablet, and smartphone. It’s all displayed fine without any problem. You can try the design in different devices by ami.responsivedesign.is
Responsive checked by ami.responsivedesign.is