It’s a New Year, and World Anvil has a new look! We heard you when you asked for a faster, sleeker UI in our Forge the Future 2022 survey. The World Anvil UI Refresh brings you a leaner, quicker, and mobile-friendly experience. We’ve even added a few extra quality of life features. But nothing’s moved – you’ll find everything pretty much where you expect it to be.

So what’s changed with the new World Anvil UI Refresh?

If you’re familiar with World Anvil, you might think it looks pretty similar at first glance… and you’d be right! We’ve kept our characteristic colors and the look and feel of World Anvil.

Mobile Friendly

Many of our changes in the World Anvil UI Refresh have focussed on mobile friendliness (a request from our Forge the Future ’22 survey) as well as optimization for smaller screens. The new UI takes up less screen real-estate, and has fewer buttons. So there’s more space for your worldbuilding! The interface is also faster and more responsive.

Improved Search

You’ll notice you can now summon the Search function with ctrl+k. But that’s not all that’s changed with Search. The whole search function is now faster, and it’s easier to copy BBCode links and blocks right from the search window, making a quicker workflow for linking your world together. You can also now quick view and quick edit articles from Search, making it faster than ever to access and update your content as you go. Oh, and for desktop users, you’ll be glad to know that you can use tab + enter to navigate search, too, which means less mousing around!

Quick Creation Improvements

The quick creation buttons have also had an overhaul. We’ve merged the old blue and green buttons at the bottom right into the Green Hammer, to save space on the interface. The +Article button replaces the old purple button, with more functionality and a guided step-by-step process of creation. It even allows you to quick-create custom article templates, and choose the article state (Public/Private and Draft/Published) during creation. Desktop users can use Ctrl+Enter to advance through the quick-create stages.

 

Better Notebook Access

The Notebook on World Anvil just got more powerful. You can now pin notebooks (from the Green hammer button ), meaning your notes will be accessible WHILST you’re worldbuilding. This is great news for everyone keeping story ideas, worldbuilding notes and CSS snippets in their notebooks!

The new notebook pin makes notes easily accessible and createable on mobile, too, so you can quickly make notes on the go!

Easier Switch between Worlds, Campaigns and Characters

The way to switch between different worldbuilding projects, campaigns and characters is now at the top of the website, and it’s also more visual (to help you remember which world is which!)

You’ll also notice that the Notebook, Discover, Studio and Learn Sections (that last one is NEW!) are available from the top bar too.

Want to learn more? Read the full Guide to the World Anvil UI

Give us feedback on the World Anvil UI Refresh!

So, how are you liking the new UI? FILL IN OUR FEEDBACK FORM (you’ll get a BADGE!) and/or let us know via Discord in the #development-feedback channel.

Who’s done all this great work?

Well, our amazing team, of course! A shout out to the incredible Dimitris, Stephan, and especially Katerina, who took the lead on this. And of course, our in-team user advocates and the incredible Alchemists Council – our community beta-testers who help us produce the best work we can on release day!

Oh, and if you DO find a bug that squeaked through all our tests, please let us know! You can report World Anvil bugs here.

What’s next for the UI?

We have more User Interface and Quality of life updates coming this year. Expect to see upcoming improvements in how you access your content, both from the article management interface and from the left menu.

You can choose upcoming World Anvil updates!

Our UI update came about because people shared their feedback – and YOU CAN TOO! Fill in our FORGE THE FUTURE OF WORLD ANVIL survey before the end of January 2024 to let us know what we should be improving, and what you already love. From the Autolinker to the DnDBeyond Importer to this new UI update, Forge the Future helps us understand what YOU need.