It is official. WordPress 5.6 will have a brand new default theme – Twenty Twenty One. It was announced by the Default Theme Design lead Mel Choyce-Dwan.
The New Theme and Design
The new theme is designed as a blank canvas for the block editor – something natively digital. As its base, Twenty Twenty One uses a modified version of the Seedlet theme. The result is a thorough system of nested CSS variables to make child theming easier and to help integrate with the global styles functionality.
By default, the theme uses a native system font stack to keep the theme simple and fast. Also, this stack is typographically neutral enabling it to be used broadly across various types of sites. Using only one font stack makes customization and child theming easier too.
A limited colour palette is used by the theme – just a pastel green background colour and two shades of dark grey for text. It will be bundled with some additional colour palettes, including a white and a black colour scheme.
The design is simple to focus on the patterns introduced in WordPress 5.5. There will be a bunch of unique patterns designed for the theme and you can create your own designs. But the patterns will be opinionated.
The team also hopes to adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 and make it the most accessible theme ever.
How to Contribute?
You can also become a part of this noble endeavour by contributing to its development. Please follow the WordPress blog to keep track of the developments and also check out the in-progress version of theme code in GitHub