Ending the day by setting up a fun little side project in Illustrator. The WordPress motto looks good in every language. (The designer in me must note I haven’t kerned these yet.)

The focus for this release was making WordPress faster and lighter. The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to 3.2 is a refreshed dashboard design that tightens the typography, design, and code behind the admin. (Rhapsody in Grey?)

— Matt Mullenweg, WordPress 3.2 now available

Back during the development of WordPress 2.8, the core team decided to solicit some ideas for dashboard refreshes. Two designs inspired by Dean J. Robinson’s Fluency Admin plugin, submitted by Dean and myself, led the informal poll the core team conducted. Ultimately the team decided to save the update for a later version of WordPress and that version came today, when WordPress 3.2 was released with the new dashboard design. A thread on the Make UI blog follows its progress as it came together. We removed unnecessary chrome, refined typography, lightened the page, and generally listened to Alan Cooper‘s advice on interface design:

“No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.”

An aside on typography: I’ve seen a few people question why we chose Arial over Helvetica for most text in the dashboard. I actually believe Arial is a better option when you’re working with text that will be displayed at 13px or below. I know that’s heresy for a graphic designer, but consider this. Helvetica, when it’s installed on Windows PCs, does not work well as a web font. Helvetica Neue is available primarily on Macs and at sufficient weights it looks great, which is why we do use it in some places. But at the default font size in the WordPress dashboard, I think Arial’s readability trumps the dogmatic purity of using Helvetica. I know this is purely subjective and this reasoning won’t change the minds of those who believe Arial is on the same level as Comic Sans — but if the sight of Arial truly offends you, I suggest disabling it OS-wide. You’ll get Helvetica in its place, and everyone will be happy. :) (Update: In the forthcoming 3.2.1 update, WordPress will use the browser-default sans-serif instead, so Mac users will see Helvetica, Windows users will see Arial, and if someone actually specifies what they want their browser default to be, we’ll use that.)

I’m proud of the updated typography and cleaner look of the new dashboard, but my favorite aspect of WordPress 3.2 was a great surprise when I first saw it. It’s also Matt Mullenweg’s favorite new feature — the new distraction-free writing mode. Combined with the Editor Styles feature popularized in last year’s Twenty Ten theme, composing in WordPress is akin to using a minimalist web-based text editor.

Composing this post in Distraction-Free Writing mode

Speaking of Twenty Ten, it’s got a beautiful successor in Twenty Eleven, the new default theme for WordPress. Following up on the improvements we made with last year’s iteration, Twenty Eleven adds a responsive design, post formats, customizable color schemes and layout configurations and more. Read Ian’s introduction to Twenty Eleven for the full rundown. This blog is using Twenty Eleven now with the one-column layout and a custom background.

There’s a ton of other features in 3.2, including faster performance, Browse Happy integration, a more useful admin bar, and hundreds of behind-the-scenes improvements. Read the exhaustive official list to see everything that’s new — then go update your blog, or start a new one!

To make room for the hot new art, I busted open the design of the site, getting rid of the borders and background colors, bumping the text up to Twenty-Ten-huge levels, and adding a ton of subtle touches for the Webkit, Opera, and Firefox 4 users to appreciate. Typekit serves up Calluna for headlines and body copy, the typeface we liked so much we used it right in the logo. It’s been lots of fun concentrating on VaultPress over the past few months, and the stuff that’s yet to come is even cooler.

Yesterday, we began rolling out a fresh round of advertising, and we wanted to take just a minute to talk about the story behind it (we are bloggers, after all). Deciding how to advertise a totally new product is a tall order. When your job is providing security and peace of mind, there's two pretty obvious marketing strategies: fear or empowerment. You can scare your users into using your product, or you can make using your product feeling empow … Read More

via VaultPress Blog

Update: Slides and links from my presentation are now online.

Yesterday, my Automattic colleague Joseph Scott launched the VideoPress Plugin for WordPress.org, meaning anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog can now use VideoPress and their WordPress.com account for high-quality ad-free video right on their self-hosted WordPress blog. :)

It’s hard to pick out highlights when an event like this goes so well, but for me, as always, it’s all about the people I meet. It’s a real honor when you can walk away from a conference with the feeling that you’ve made a few new friends. Thanks to the organizers, volunteers, speakers and of course the attendees who made for a memorable weekend. I can’t wait to do it again real soon.

Original: After a slight hiccup with 1.2, I’m proud to point you toward WordPress for iPhone 1.21, a pretty substantial update to our mobile app. I wont run down all the features here, but theres lots of new stuff and we’ve already started planning the next version. Download and enjoy! (Composing a post — like I’m doing now — is about a hundred times easier with the landscape keyboard!)

With a rich set of over 1,000 new APIs, iPhone SDK for iPhone OS 3.0 beta provides you with an amazing range of technologies to enhance the functionality of your iPhone and iPod touch applications. New APIs also provide support for applications to communicate with hardware accessories attached to iPhone or iPod touch.

The nice part about this, for me, is that I just copied and pasted that quote from Apple’s web site into this post, which I composed using WordPress for iPhone. The future’s gonna be great.

• WordCamp New Orleans is being held April 10th and 11th and I’ll be there (on Friday), along with Automattic’s own Douglas Hanna and a bunch of really smart people. If you’d like to chat about design, the WordPress UI, CSS3, the new Pepsi logo, or how much you hate Internet Explorer, be sure to find me.
• Automattic recently released P2, the reincarnation of Prologue, the micro-blogging theme for WordPress. We have some really exciting things in store for the design of P2 that will make it ridiculously easy (and fun) to customize the theme. We use P2 for internal back-and-forth at Automattic and it has brought with it a surprising aspect of collegiality. It’s a pretty cool thing.
• The “I <3 Blogging" contest is in full-swing, but entries are due March 31. I’ll be one of the “celebrity” judges so get in there and enter your submission. There’s some pretty cool prizes up for grabs and I really want a great design to win!