If you’re a WordPress aficionado you’ll know why one of the most eagerly awaited announcements each year is the arrival of a new default theme. Wait no longer, friends. I’m thrilled to introduce the newest addition, Twenty Thirteen. This gorgeous theme is colorful, opinionated, and ready to give your blog a warm, welcoming vibe.
An important goal of the yearly default theme is to be different than before, pushing visual boundaries and finding new ways to display your handcrafted content. Twenty Thirteen does just that, taking us back to the blog by featuring a full range of post formats, each displayed beautifully in their own unique way.
Delight and engage your visitors with this vibrant design, from the color scheme and matching header images to excellent typography and beautiful icons. All within a flexible, wide layout that looks great on large screens yet remains readable on any device, big or small.
Colorful to the max, Twenty Thirteen showcases your lovingly crafted content with bold and unapologetic colors. Large, alternating swaths of color are intended to encourage posting a variety of formats—writing all kinds of different content on your blog: images, videos, quotes, links, and more. The result is a lush and attractive layout.
Twenty Thirteen is chock full of other fun design details to make you smile. See it for yourself on the demo blog—things like the off-size post navigation circles and the funky 404 page. The typography is beautiful and readable with Source Sans Pro for body text, Bitter for headings, and a symbol-font called Genericons for seamlessly scaling icons.
And there’s more… learn about everything in Twenty Thirteen on the Theme Showcase.
Designed by Joen Asmussen and built by a cadre of enthusiasts in the WordPress community, Twenty Thirteen is now available in your WordPress.com dashboard at Appearance → Themes. Self-hosted WordPress.org users will have access to the bundled theme with the official 3.6 software release, coming soon.
I hope you get a thrill out of this new theme in all its colorful glory.
WordPress.com News 
2013 rocks!
It’s lovely.
2013 is a great theme! I’ve already morphed it with a child theme on my own personal website (MichaelMusgrove.com)
Nifty, you’re ahead of the game by using it as a starting point.
Looks awesome!
I don’t like it. Not my style at all, but there are others which are great!
Great work, WP.
Very nice work!!!
So cool. I recently ran across Jeremy Felt’s blog which seems to use 2013, although I suspect it is an earlier version. I thought, “that is what a modern theme should look like.” http://jeremyfelt.com/
I love early adopters because they often help us find bugs early. Glad he “Felt” like trying it out—lookin’ good!
I can say it don’t suck. But it don’t fit what I’m doing on my site.
I like it. It’s pretty cool.
It isn’t the ugliest thing I have ever seen … but the sheer size of it is ridiculous. Any good developer / designer knows, the less the viewer has to do the better. My hand hurts from all the scrolling. Also, could have jazzed up the Menu, it is god awful ugly.
Sorry to hear this theme doesn’t make the cut for you, and of course the strategy of a new, different theme each year means there are more choices for a variety of tastes. It’s OK if every theme doesn’t appeal to everyone.
It’s fully responsive. The features are attractive to me and the colors are too. I’m excited as I think I love it so I’m off to give it a tryout in my test blog.
This is, for me, the mixture of minimalism and colors. Perfect for any type of post.
Well said.
It’s going to be a huge hit!
Nice. Love it when new themes come out. Thanks! ♪♫♪♫
The WordPress NEW LOOK is so good-looking and reachable, for the new bloggers! … LOVE IT!
Nice theme! 🙂
Energic colorful theme. Love it!
Whoa…that’s a wee bit too colorful for me. This theme is nice, but as a default theme? I don’t know…
Oh my! That looks really pretty on my cellphone!
Boom!
I like it except for one thing.
The text in blockquotes is very big in comparison to body text. It’s about as tall as H2 text.
A quote of this size text look OK for a quote of a few words, but I think it’s overpowering when used for a paragraph or two.
Or three.
On the iPhone, blockquote is about the size of H4 text.
Strange.
Nice work… I like this…
Lurv the space grooves ‘n milk shakes. I used to work in a milk bar once, making milk shakes.
Makes me feel 20 again… no, 13! NO, 20… 🙂
Wow! What a wonderful write-up. I want to start another blog just to use it!!
I’m always waiting on a new theme for a new year! This theme should be Monster theme for this year! Awesome! I think this theme is better than the older themes… good job. 😀
It’s a great new theme, strong, flexible and responsive. Good work!
I’m excited by this one. I love the colours – I really appreciate something other than blue which seems to have become dominant in new themes recently. I tried it on my test blog without the header image and the font looked very appealing, bold and easy to read. I’m looking forward to hearing what timethief thinks – I value her opinion!
It’s lovely! 🙂
Love it!
Excellent work guys – switched both my personal and technical blogs over to it. Will experiment with it a little later.
@Evan Williams – “Any good developer / designer knows..” that things change. Even the web. I think WP pays great homage to the reason for blogging with a theme that encourages storytelling like this. And I predict the scrolling is here to stay. At least while the tablets are. And I have a hunch they’ll be around for a while too.
Not good, I don’t like it…
Do the colors slow down loading time for the viewer?
Luckily, it does not; the technology behind Twenty Thirteen is at the core of modern web design, notably using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for layout, colors, and typography which means it’s native and loads ultrafast.
Very AWESOME!
I do respect the creativity in 2013, but as a developer I’ve always used the 20xx theme as a my go-to “does the plugin I developed work in 20xx?” theme tester. I feel that 2013 is too creative for these kind of test now. I’ve always like that WordPress had a yearly (somewhat) “generic” theme.
I know 2013 isn’t for everyone.
The cool thing is we can now do both—creative and fun and bloggy, then next year a more CMS-like theme like Twenty Twelve or Twenty Eleven. As long as we alternate, it’ll give us all better options to choose from.
As always – very inspiring reading and looking through the posts with new themes! Great work – I like 2013 especially. 🙂
For some reason, this theme reminds of the beautiful metro style I am so in love with on Windows 8 and Windows Phone. So, yeah, activated it. Thank you for making this available.
It’s…weird…
I think that’s a good thing. 🙂
Great theme, so beautiful. I’m thinking of changing my theme.
Great theme. And it is in our color/branding. Your offerings push me out of my box. Grateful.
It looks neat! The colors are a bit overwhelming at first, but it definitely makes a statement. 🙂
That’s some big text!! Good work WP. Not for me but I’m sure lots of WordPressers will be excited!
Nice theme. I should check it out!
Looks great dudes!
This looks great!
Like the theme, but I do love my site on 2011 though so won’t be switching just yet.
When we’ll see it available on wordpress.org themes for download?
Soon—keep an eye on http://wordpress.org/news/ for updates on the next release (version 3.6).
Amazing… It’s in beta version, already on my WAMP testing and customizing. 🙂
WordPress3.6-b2: http://wordpress.org/news/2013/04/wordpress-3-6-beta-2/
Thanks Lance, been following wpdevel 2013 discussions, thanks for making it available. All white would be better if you guys can put custom color palettes in free usage, like say two three combinations, but it is a great addition even in native form, thank you all.
Good point—I think we’ll see more folks making their own customized colors, especially for self-hosted blogs, like http://ottopress.com/2013/im-not-a-fan-of-orange/. We seriously considered adding more color options for the base theme, but ultimately had to drop it because it was too much complexity to meet our strict design and development deadlines.
otto42 is always awesome, it was weeks before you guys ported it here.
Yep, it’s been in development in WordPress core since early in the year.
That’s the best default theme that I’ve seen yet! Great job guys!
Very good, a high-quality one.
Very interesting. I’ll try it on my test blog. Plus, I love the phrase “The Future is Fantastic” ! You always come up with the obviously simple and profound.
The better start of week since a lot of time. Thanks guys!
Funky, big, rich and in glorious technicolor… it rocks. Thanks for the early adition!
Really enjoy the colors of 2013. Just the inviting atmosphere I’ve been looking for.
This is a great theme, for free! The only thing I’d wish is if you remove the feature image which shows up in the middle top section of the blog post (if the feature image is different than what it is inserted into the post). Otherwise, I don’t see any other shortcomings. Thank you.
Thanks for your feedback. You can of course avoid the featured image display by not simply not using a featured image; or by making them larger width—the best sizes are 724 pixels or 604 pixels wide.
I must say… I’m not that huge of a fan. Twenty Eleven is where it’s at. 🙂
Some really cool themes. Not sure if I would use them, but I like the concept. Thanks for sharing.