[New post] Personalize Your Blog with the New Custom Design Upgrade

Personalize Your Blog with the New Custom Design Upgrade

Lance Willett | June 15, 2011 at 4:09 pm | Categories: Customization, Design, Features, New Features, Upgrade | URL: http://wp.me/pf2B5-1Rn

Today we're excited to bring you Custom Design, a powerful new tool that combines easy to use, code-free font selection from Typekit and a beautiful CSS editing interface with world-class support from our famous WordPress.com Happiness Engineers.

You'll find both new features—Fonts and CSS—under Appearance → Custom Design in your dashboard. Custom Design costs just $30 a year, and both features include a free preview so you can try them out first.

Example of Custom Design landing screen.

Fonts Made Super Easy

The Font Editor provides a visual preview of your blog with over 50 gorgeous premium Typekit fonts—from foundries like Mark Simonson, exljbris, FontFont, and the League of Moveable Type—and allows you to easily modify the size and style of your fonts. It works with all themes, no coding skills required!

Example of choosing fonts with the Font Editor.

We worked closely with Typekit on this new tool—incorporating their long experience with delivering beautiful fonts on the web—to create the best experience possible. With the Custom Design upgrade comes the ability to manage all your Typekit fonts settings from within your dashboard; you no longer need to make a roundtrip to Typekit and back to update the fonts on your blog.

If you are already using Typekit fonts on your blog, you are grandfathered in—meaning your fonts will continue to display as they do now but you'll have limited editing and functionality. To take advantage of all the new features, we encourage you to upgrade to Custom Design.

CSS Backed by Expertise

Our popular CSS editing tool received a visual refresh with its merge into the Custom Design upgrade. If you know your way around a cascading style sheet, you can use the CSS Editor to really put a personal touch on your blog and create an entirely new design.

CSS editor in action.

If your site already has custom CSS enabled, it will continue to work as it does now, and visitors will see no changes to your design. Furthermore, you've been upgraded to the new Custom Design package for free, so you now have full access to all the new features, including the Font Editor.

Along with the CSS Editor updates we're making the WordPress.com CSS forum officially supported by the WP.com Happiness team. Bring your CSS customization questions to the forum and you can get expert help.

From your feedback—and by seeing your cool customizations in use all over WordPress.com—we know that design tools on WordPress.com are put to good use, so we hope you love this new upgrade. Fonts are now incredibly easy. We're now helping you craft your CSS. Let's make something beautiful.

If you'd like more details on the new upgrade, head over to Custom Design.

Add a comment to this post