Adding a Custom Dashboard Logo in WordPress for Branding

When creating themes for clients, you might want to provide them with some administrative branding. The first and easiest way to do that is by replacing the WordPress logo with your Custom Logo in the admin dashboard.

First you would need to create an image that has the dimensions of 30px wide and 31px tall. This image would need to be transparent either .gif or .png. The image matte color must match the background color which has the hex value of #464646.

Save that image in your theme’s image folder (/wp-content/themes/theme-name/images) and name it whatever you like. In this example we will be naming it custom-logo.gif.

Now open your functions.php file located in your themes folder and add the following function in there:

//hook the administrative header output
add_action('admin_head', 'my_custom_logo');

function my_custom_logo() {
echo '
<style type="text/css">
#header-logo { background-image: url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/custom-logo.gif) !important; }
</style>
';
}

By adding this function, you are telling WordPress to add a function my_custom_logo in the field admin_head. This function will replace the original WordPress ‘W’ with your custom logo.

This is how it would look:

This trick is from Jacob Goldman’s Article on Smashing Magazine