General Design
My first impression when viewing this theme is the strong, bold, and spacious design that is evocative of the '80s. The author meticulously encapsulated this antique style in every element such as typography, colors, layouts, graphics, ... Hence, when I scroll down this theme, it's interesting as though I was reading an old-style newspaper. Besides, a lot of airy space added in Retro Blog completely free my mind and help me focus on the important contents.

The generally retro and spacious design of the Retro Blog theme
Besides, this theme brings a harmonious uniformity in design that demonstrates through the decoration, meticulously in the pretty items like the font (1) and bound lines (2), (3), (4). This type of decoration is one of the most typical designs in the retro styles and it becomes the highlight point of this theme.

The uniformity in decoration design
Other elements
Typography and Color
The use of fonts is very delicate and suitable for the general retro appearance of this theme. When learning about the typical fonts used in retro style, I found that there are several favorite types. One of them is the striped shadow vintage typeface that the author pre-built for your site title (1). The combination of black and dark orange in the stripes is so perfect to give a flashy sensation for the retro style. Also, each letter is designed with shadow to create a strong and bold look that can attract almost visitors.
Another favorite type is hand-lettering fonts of the tagline and posts' titles (2). This font type is designed in a flexible and graceful manner to make your site more creative and tasteful.

The distinct and typical fonts reflect the retro style
With the text content, the author uses a simple and legible font so that visitors can easily catch your content.

The legible font used for the text content
The whole theme uses the neutral color of the black, white, and grey palette, which is harmonious with the generally clean style. Besides, to make some highlights, the author adds color to elements like the hyperlinks (1), and the tags (2). The chosen color is burnt orange only, which is so eye-catching and can clearly express the retro style.

Using dark red color to highlight elements
Note that these font and color types are the only custom option provided, so you can't change into other favorite fonts or colors.
Header
Keeping only necessary elements, this header is so simple, spacious, and airy that you can easily highlight your site title and its creative design here. Also, there is one and only layout for the header so that you don't need to wonder among header layout options.

The spacious header with the eye-catching site title
Similarly, the style of the site title is unchangeable. It's always big block capital letters, regardless of your site title length. When I reviewed this section by typing our Free WordPress Themes Reviews' tittle, it displayed such sizeable texts like that. Thus, this notable typography may become disadvantageous to a website with a long title like ours.

Review the header with a long site title
Slider
Right below the header is a notable post slider with a distinct way of display. Different from a normal post slider with the excerpt placed on the slider, this theme place the excerpt on a layer that overlaps and considerably deviated downwards from the slider as below. Additionally, the excerpt layer is creatively styled with a slight stripe boundary, which is, again, a typical design of retro style. That's a beautiful slider but personally, I wish this boundary is more colorful to be more impressive.

The beautiful and impressive slider
Footer
Scrolling to the footer, I was impressed one more time with the footer design that closely reflects retro and vintage style through the tags (1) and pattern lines (2). The most striking design is the red tags above each widget, which are created as handmade tags that recall the decoration of crafted presents in the 80s'. Besides, the drawing of some pattern lines can beautifully embellish this footer. That's really a fantastic design of this free theme.

The highlight tags and delicate patterns in the footer
This style of the footer is also fixed. You cannot change this black background, the three-column layout, or the line/tag decorations of this footer. That may be another limit in footer design.
Achieve Pages
The archive post pages have the clean and airy layouts following the general design of the Retro Blog theme. There are three columns to arrange posts with a special column style that is decorated with a gorgeous call-to-action. Also, adding eye-catching hover effects is a plus point that can gain more attraction to your blog.

The archive pages with beautiful hover effects
You can also add a right/left sidebar to these archive pages. This sidebar is designed in a simple and extensive way that accompanies the whole theme style with the creative hand-writing title.

Adding the right sidebar to the archive page
However, adding the sidebar break the whole balanced layout of these archive pages. Also, this changes the size of featured images and stretch the posts of the first column. Thus, I highly recommend you choose the full-width layout instead of the sidebar one.

Some disadvantages of the sidebar in archive page design
Note that this theme has no other choices of the archive page layout for different tastes.
Single Post Pages
The single post pages display text content in an easy-to-follow way with legible texts and reasonable line spacing. Notably, the featured image is nicely displayed in a full-width size that is super stunning.

The featured image is nicely displayed in the single post page
Other Minor Elements
This free theme added an adorable preloaded effect when loading sites like this. It's lively and interesting, however, not really match the retro style of the theme. You should carefully consider enabling it.

An amazing preloaded effect
Responsive
Here is good news for you: this theme is already designed responsively that helps your site nicely display on all devices of any sizes. You can also use some tools on the Internet to check the responsive as below by yourself.

This blog theme nicely display on all devices of any sizes