Every year the WordPress team proudly unveils a new default theme, increasing by one the collection now known affectionately as the Twenty Somethings. Serving as the flagship theme for a year, it has big shoes to fill. The theme should work well for a blog or a website, be carefully crafted under-the-hood to support essential WordPress features, and—of course—it should be aesthetically pleasing and exciting.

Say hello to the new default WordPress theme for 2012.

Twenty Twelve is an elegant, readable, and fully responsive theme that makes your site content look its best on any device.

A key component of this theme is a special homepage template. Recently, it's become even more evident that WordPress is heavily used as a content management system (CMS) with many more sites now using it to organize any kind of content rather than purely as a blog. The homepage template meets this need by allowing authors to craft a perfect introductory page—it's the first thing visitors see. Homepage content (text, images, video, anything you'd like) lives in the upper area, and below it you can arrange specific homepage-only widgets.

What makes this theme really shine are the design details. Starting with a thoughtfully crafted mobile-first layout, Twenty Twelve is intended to be viewed on any size device from smartphones and tablets up to the latest and greatest HiDPI/retina screens. No matter how your readers decide to visit, it'll remain usable and good-looking.

To increase readability and attractiveness, Twenty Twelve features the gorgeous Open Sans typeface. Refreshingly different from the basic web fonts of yesteryear, this font spruces up your prose and gives your content a modern, clean look.

Since I already mentioned the Twenty Somethings, I'd also like to highlight how this one is different. Here are two key departures from previous default themes.

First, you'll see in the styling for post formats that the design remains consistent on both list and single views. Links, quotes, asides, and images that you select to be formatted as such in your post editor are shown a bit differently than standard blog posts—and they'll retain their unique look-and-feel across your site.

Second, you'll notice that a custom header image is not visible when you first activate the theme. Unlike Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven, this theme doesn't come with a set of hand-chosen header images, nor does it use featured images as large banners at the top of posts and pages. A header image is supported by the theme, though this time the feature will be turned off until you choose to upload your own.

Learn all about these features and more on the Theme Showcase.

Designed by Drew Strojny and built by many hands in the WordPress community, Twenty Twelve is now available in your WordPress.com dashboard at Appearance → Themes. Self-hosted WordPress.org users will have access very soon via the WordPress.org Extend theme directory, and the new theme will be bundled with the official 3.5 software release later this year.

I hope you enjoy the new theme and the new look.