As you all know, I’m not much for editor bling even though I care immensely what my finished text looks like. Still, I did take to heart Charles Choi’s recommendation to use proportional fonts for prose. The idea is that it’s easier to read and edit prose when it’s in a proportional font. That aside, the only other “beautification” I make to my Org buffers is to use the previous default of a larger font and different color for the title. Org did away with that some time ago but I resurrected it with
(set-face-attribute 'org-document-title nil :foreground "midnight blue" :weight 'bold :height 1.44))
If you adhere to a less austere style in your Emacs buffers, you should take a look at Diego Zamboni’s recent post on Beautifying Org Mode in Emacs. He’s got a lot of nice ideas for customizing the look of your org buffers without resorting to a wholesale theme change.
His changes mainly consist of changing the font faces and sizes for the various headline levels and for ensuring that code fragments were still rendered in a monospace font. He also sets visual-line-mode on to make things look better in proportional fonts. I do that too but to solve formatting problems when exporting to HTML.
He hides the emphasis markup, which I definitely don’t like but he also made a simple change to make list bullets appear as actual bullets (•) rather than the default -. He makes some other suggestions, as well, so it’s well worth taking a look at his post if you’re interested in gussying up your Org buffers.