I had the privilege of designing the 2021 WordPress default theme, Twenty Twenty-One, which was released alongside WordPress 5.6.
Twenty Twenty-One was designed to be a blank canvas for the block editor. After trying some designs heavily inspired by print resources, @kjellr remarked to me, “why not try something natively digital?” I added even more ideas to my increasingly unwieldy pinterest board and gave it a shot. The concept ended up being the most natural, usable design of the bunch. It was simple and un-opinionated, yet still refined. It felt like a fresh canvas, waiting to be painted.
Twenty Twenty-One used a modified version of the Seedlet theme as its base. This provided us with a thorough system of nested CSS variables to make child theming easier, and to help integrate with the global styles functionality that was under development for full-site editing.
I’m so excited for this one — simple + refined, but with a modern twist. I’m looking forward to contributing!
Kjell Reigstad
Wow! This is fantastic work. I’m feeling inspired just looking at the screenshots. Thank you to everyone who is pouring their hearts into making this a reality <3
Anne McCarthy
Design Decisions
By default, the theme uses a native system font stack. I made this choice for a couple reasons:
- No extra load time. Let’s keep this theme simple and fast.
- This particular stack is pretty typographically “neutral” — none of the fonts are super opinionated, so the theme can be used broadly across different types of sites.
- Using just the one font stack, without loading additional font files, also makes it easier for folks to customize or create a child theme for Twenty Twenty-One. We want this theme to be a teaching tool, and an outlet for your creativity.
The theme also uses a limited color palette: a pastel green background color, and two shades of dark grey for text. We’ll be bundling the theme with some additional color palettes, including both a white and a black color scheme.
(Why pastel green? Pastels and muted colors were pretty in right then.)
All this is to say: the design? It’s pretty simple. That’s where patterns come in.
Gutenberg introduced support for patterns in WordPress 5.5. This was the perfect time to show them off. Twenty Twenty-One came packaged with a bunch of unique patterns designed explicitly for the theme. The theme’s overall design was simple, so you could make it your own, but the patterns were opinionated.
You can learn more about the theme in my initial announcement post and the theme download page.