Photos can add life to your blog and be the catalyst for getting a message across to your readers. Today, we launched new options for our WordPress.com galleries that allow you to create elegant magazine-style mosaic layouts for your photos–without having to use an external graphic editor.

When adding a gallery to your post, you now have the option to select a layout style for your images. We’ve added support for Rectangular, Square, and Circular galleries (take a look at the screenshots below for examples). By default, galleries will continue to display using the standard thumbnail grid layout. To switch to one of the new layouts, head over to Settings –> Media in your blog’s dashboard, scroll down to “Image Gallery Carousel,” and select the box next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.”

Choosing this option makes the new look the default for all your blog’s…

Happy Themeday, all! Today we have two brand-spankin’-new themes for your visual enjoyment.

First up is Gridspace, a classic, elegant premium theme by Graph Paper Press.

Gridspace lets you show your work in style. Designed as a portfolio for photographers, its slick features include light and dark color schemes, multiple thumbnail sizes, a responsive design, and a convenient space for your logo. Your readers can easily switch between two blog layouts on the fly – grid view and list view – while large featured images and an elegant overall design make your work the focus.

Live on the grid, and check out Gridspace on the Theme Showcase!

Next up is Ascetica, a beautiful theme from AlienWP, designed by Galin Simeonov.

Get rid of the clutter and concentrate on your content. Ascetica prefers subtle details over flashy gimmicks and provides the perfect balance of minimalism, white-space, responsiveness, and customization to allow you to focus…

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…

We’ve just released two improvements that will make WordPress.com even more efficient for you, leaving you more time to create content.

Site Stats

If you get a lot of traffic to your blog, your stats were sometimes slow to load.  We know you like to look at your stats often, think about how all those seconds added up.  Now, your main stats page loads all of its data in parallel:

This loads your whole stats page two to three times faster, which means less time spent staring at a spinner and more time for interacting with your readers and creating content.

Of course, if you’re a Jetpack user, you can partake in the speedy stats goodness on your WordPress.com stats page as well!

Toolbar Notifications

We’ve made your Toolbar Notifications faster to interact with also. Now you can navigate the Notifications menu from your keyboard.

Keys:

• n : Open/Close the…