This document summarizes the development process of the Twenty Thirteen default WordPress theme. It discusses the goals of annual default themes, the general process of developing one, and specifics about Twenty Thirteen. A team was assembled including a project owner, designer, developer, and lead. The design vision was for a theme focused on blogging with unique post formats. It launched alongside WordPress 3.6 in April 2013 after months of design, development, and testing.

1. Twenty Thirteen
Ins and Outs of Developing a Default Theme

2. Konstantin
Obenland
Theme Wrangler at Automattic
@obenland
profiles.wordpress.org/obenland

4. twentythirteendemo.wordpress.com

5. Default Themes In General

6. Goals With Yearly Themes
- Create something different
from the year before
- Show off the latest and
greatest features
- Support child themes and
encourage customization
- Have an aesthetically
pleasing design
- Work for a blog or a website
- Represent best coding
practices, technical
excellence

7. General Process
Matt sets design vision and feature directionMatt sets design vision and feature direction
Designer creates mockups
Matt selects an existing theme
Wrangler converts mockups into a
working theme
Matt selects an existing theme
Community tests and polishes the draftCommunity tests and polishes the draft

8. Twenty Thirteen

9. Team for Twenty Thirteen
Matt
Project Owner
Joen
Theme Designer
Konstantin
Theme Developer
Lance
Project Lead

10. January February March April
Timeline
158 27 29
Kick Off
January 2
2
First design mockups
January 17
17
Final design
January 31
31
Working Theme
February 8
Core commit
February 15
Code freeze
March 27
Release
April 29

11. Design Vision
- Back to the blog
- Beautiful implementation of post formats
- Visually very unique, maybe even a little quirky

12. Homework
- HTML5 comment markup
- HTML5 input types for comment form and search form
- Provide context for translation in search form and comments
heading
- Twenty Thirteen to be designed with accessibility as a priority

13. Opinionated Design
- Full of fun design details to create a
warm and welcoming vibe.
- Ships with three header images
that work well with the bold color
scheme.
- One-column layout is the default —
theme works best with no sidebar.
- Optional display fonts for beautiful
typography.
- A flexible, wide layout that looks
great on large screens yet remains
device-agnostic.
- Bundled icon font that makes
zooming, printing, and recoloring
much easier and more accessible.

14. Release
- Together with 3.6 release
- Pre-release on WordPress.com
- No pre-release to the WordPress.org Themes Directory

15. What’s next?
twentyfourteendemo.wordpress.com

16. Thank you!
Questions?