WordPress Brand Guidelines: The Open-Source W

WordPress isn’t really a company — it’s an open-source project with a mission printed in its footer.

WordPress was first released on 27 May 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, as a fork of the discontinued blogging tool b2/cafelog. It’s open-source software (GPL), and its stated purpose is to “democratize publishing” — to let anyone put words on the web for free. That ethos runs right down to the tagline shown in the admin dashboard for years: “Code is Poetry.” The identity is deliberately understated — a circled “W,” a calm blue, plain type — because the brand isn’t the point; the mission is. It now powers a huge share of all websites, and still ships with that same modest footer.

Behind the friendly circled letter is a surprisingly careful trademark structure.

The circled “W” and the “WordPress” name are owned not by a company but by the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit — while Automattic (Mullenweg’s for-profit company, behind WordPress.com) merely licenses them. There’s even an official spelling rule: always “WordPress,” capital W and P. A nuance worth knowing: the full name is trademark-protected, but the abbreviation “WP” is not — which is why so many plugins use it. For a project built on openness, the marks are the one thing kept deliberately tidy. (Our homage sidesteps it entirely with a neutral letter.)

A trustworthy blue and a neutral grey — with the blue quietly modernised over time. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

The classic WordPress blue is #21759B, paired with a dark grey #464646 and, historically, a warm orange #D54E21. More recently the admin and block editor standardised on a brighter, friendlier #3858E9 (from WordPress 5.7 onward). Treat the classic trio as the well-established heritage palette and #3858E9 as the current interface blue. It’s an unshowy, functional set — exactly right for software meant to fade into the background so your content is the star. Copy the working values below.

The wordmark uses two special typefaces reserved for one job only.

Per WordPress’s own design handbook, the logotype is set in two Emigre typefaces — Mrs Eaves Small Caps and Dalliance — that are “reserved for the Logotype only.” Everything else in the brand runs in the clean, open-source Open Sans (this page is set in it). Separately, the WordPress.org website uses Inter and EB Garamond. It’s a well-organised system for a sprawling open-source project: a special face for the logo, a workhorse humanist sans for everything else. The specimen below is set in Open Sans.

WordPress’s design restraint is a direct expression of how it’s built — in the open, by thousands of hands.

Because WordPress is released under the GPL, anyone can take the software, extend it and ship it forward — which is exactly what a vast community of theme and plugin authors has done for two decades. That’s why the core identity stays so deliberately plain: a single blue, a workhorse humanist sans, a modest footer. A loud, precious brand would sit awkwardly on software meant to be reskinned ten thousand different ways. The initiative ‘Five for the Future’ asks companies that profit from WordPress to give roughly five percent of their resources back to the project, and the twice-yearly WordCamp gatherings keep the community close and the culture friendly. Even the block editor, Gutenberg, reflects the same principle: hand people simple, composable pieces and let them build the page.

For designers, the lesson is portable. When your product is a canvas for other people’s work, the brand’s job is to get out of the way — to be recognisable without being domineering. WordPress’s blue never competes with the millions of sites it powers; it just quietly signs them, the way a good pencil never distracts from the drawing. That is why, after twenty-odd years and countless redesign trends, the mark has barely needed to change.

Keep WordPress’s system on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.