WordPress.com Dashboard Gets a Beautiful, Darker Look
Raelene Morey   – June 18, 2013
1 Comment

WordPress.com Dashboard Gets a Beautiful, Darker Look

WordPress.com has been given a tall, dark and handsome makeover. Well, maybe not the tall bit.

Automattic designer Matt Thomas yesterday announced the dashboard’s redesign, which features better contrast, the “oh-so-lovely” Open Sans as the default typeface… and is pretty much the (top secret!) MP6 plugin many of us were expecting would be part of WordPress 3.6.

WordPress.com redesign
The new design features the Open Sans typeface as the default font.

The revamp also includes redrawn icons and spacing in the dashboard has been opened up.

Thomas said he had a handful of goals for the redesign, which included:

  • A simply, uncluttered design; free of excessive decoration and focused on your content.
  • It should use webfonts for beautiful, legible typography that’s consistent in every browser.
  • A responsive design tailored to desktop computers, tablets and smartphones.
  • It should be able to do all this while retaining the familiar user-tested dashboard interface that millions of users already understand.

He said work was still underway on a responsive design for users who used smartphones or tablets to post to their WordPress.com site.

The new dashboard will be available later this year, but is available to preview now.

New WordPress.com dashboard
The WordPress.com dashboard has been given a darker, sleeker revamp.

To enable the responsive dashboard, go to Users > Personal Settings and click the checkbox next to “Enable experimental responsive design (MP6)”.

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Thomas was quick to respond to comments in his announcement post about bugs in the design. He has encouraged users to send any screenshots to WordPress.com support.

The announcement comes after the final weekly update for the MP6 plugin at Make WordPress UI on June 8.

In response to a question about whether MP6 will be the new WordPress 3.6 dashboard design, Thomas reassured users the plugin wouldn’t be part of the release. It’s possible we will see this dashboard design in a future release of WordPress.

It’s great to see the dashboard has been given a beautiful look. Hopefully the confusing navigation will be next to get a makeover because I’m not the only one who gets lost trying to use it.

What do you think of the redesigned dashboard? Do you think it meets Thomas’ goals? Tell us in the comments below.

Image credit: Pixabay

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