Matt (Thomas) Miklic

I’m a little bit late in finding this thread but thought it might be worth offering a response.

Aesthetics are subjective (I could probably stop writing now, but bear with me). And every design is a product of the era in which it was created. The things the original poster preferred about the previous design of WordPress were popular around the time it was designed, as much or moreso than “flat” design is today (fun fact: if you check the official 3.8 announcement or my post about its design, you won’t find the word “flat”). That’s why we explicitly chose not to eliminate all traces of “3D-ness” from the admin — metaboxes still have drop shadows, buttons still have gradients and heft, text fields still have inner shadows; all of this is meant to ensure that WordPress doesn’t fall into the trap of a visual aesthetic so flat that it affects usability.

It’s understandable to feel frustration when there’s a visual redesign that introduces changes that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable at first. But with every change in 3.8, from the choice of font to the color schemes, we took care to ensure that accessibility and usability would not be sacrificed in the name of change for change’s sake. We understood that not everyone would be a fan of the new design, but our experience so far tells us that on balance, the changes have had their intended effect.

With that said, we’re far from perfect and always welcome input for future versions — here is fine, but joining the effort and contributing directly to a future release cycle is a much better way to get your voice heard. We may not be able to make some individual users happy in the short term, but in the long term we’ll continue working to make the design of WordPress as good as it possibly can be.

We’ve reserved the light weight of Open Sans for limited uses such as headlines for the purposes of cross-platform readability. The lightest weight available, 300, renders with a 1px stroke on Windows XP with font smoothing disabled, and can impact legibility as a result.

Regarding letter-spacing it’s actually not doing anything at this small of a size (0.05em being less than 1px, which can’t really be adjusted on screen) but it gives me a chance to quote a great typographer: “A man who would letterspace lowercase would steal sheep” — Frederic Goudy https://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.7/ ??

This should be fixed as of version 2.2.

Thanks for the report; we’ve identified the issue and should have a fix committed later today.

Thanks for reporting this. We’re working on some changes to the way we link to Open Sans; in the meantime I’ve issued an update (version 2.2.1) that reverts to the old font linking method. This should take care of this for you.

Hey Anointed — that issue with the submenus not appearing has been fixed up if you update to the latest version. Thanks for the review!

Thanks; we’ll take a look.

Hi; could you let us know which theme you’re using?

Thanks for the suggestion; I’ve made this change in trunk.

Thanks! This was fixed in version 0.3 so I’m marking it resolved.

Yep, expect brokenness at this stage; there’s a lot of moving parts being affected by MP6 and many parts of the design still aren’t final.

Actually, stay tuned on the responsive front — there may be more news on that this Friday.

Thanks for the report; we’ll take a look at this.

Thanks, Sam. We completely agree that the admin strongly needs to be made responsive for mobile and tablet browsers — but it actually will be a pretty big task, considering the wide range of UX issues that arise when adapting an interface made for the desktop to small screens. Because of that, we decided that making the admin responsive was outside the scope for MP6, which is functionally a very simple plugin.

Thanks; we’ll take a look at this and get a fix into the next version.