An editorial travel magazine, built for a Southeast Asia storyteller.
A WordPress theme designed for slow travel writing — warm cream palette, magazine-style asymmetric grids, and a reading experience that treats words and images with equal respect.
A travel blog that read like a magazine — not another generic WordPress site.
Mums Travels needed an upgrade. Their content — slow travel essays from Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, and beyond — was strong, but the existing theme made every post look like every other WordPress travel blog. They wanted something with the warmth of a print publication and the soul of Roads & Kingdoms: editorial typography, generous whitespace, and asymmetric layouts that let images breathe.
The brief was clear: build a theme that respects the writing, makes navigation across destinations effortless, and runs on standard WordPress hosting without requiring a builder plugin.
Warm tones, editorial serif, asymmetric rhythm.
The aesthetic is built around three commitments: a cream-and-orange palette that feels like a well-worn travel journal, Fraunces as the editorial serif (with all its optical-size warmth), and an asymmetric “Recent Stories” grid that breaks the usual three-column blog monotony.
Palette
Typography
in Kyoto
A complete editorial system, not just a homepage.
Auto-populating homepage
Hero, 3-card featured grid, and 5-card asymmetric “Recent Stories” grid — all pulled from the post stream automatically with smart offsets.
Conditional sidebar
Blog pages get a right-side widget area only when widgets are added. Empty? It falls back to full-width gracefully.
Drop-cap reading view
Single-post template with a Fraunces drop cap, generous line-height, and an orange-accented blockquote style — built for long-form.
Native customizer
Brand, newsletter, and social settings live in the standard WordPress Customizer — no plugin lock-in, no proprietary panel.
Category-aware cards
Every card pulls its destination tag from the post’s first category, so the magazine-style country pills update automatically.
Built for accessibility
Skip-to-content link, semantic landmarks, ARIA labels on icon buttons, and color contrast tested against WCAG AA.
No builders. No bloat. Just clean WordPress.
The theme is written in vanilla PHP against the WordPress template hierarchy — no Elementor, Divi, or page-builder dependency. CSS is hand-authored, organized into 17 logical sections, with custom properties for every design token. The whole package is under 400KB zipped.
Need something built with care?
We design and develop custom WordPress themes, web apps, and editorial platforms for clients who treat their content like it matters.
