Dashboard styles are specific to Seven

Yeah, it shouldn't be by design. This is a classic case of too much Seven-specific CSS in the dashboard module.

Better title. We badly need to fix this. And we need a separate issue for that Overlay tabs styling.

Just thinking out loud, this could help the font-sizes in gardland's style.css

#dashboard #disabled-blocks h2 {
  font-size: 12px;	
}

I've been testing out other ideas about overrides to place in gardland's style.css. But then I came to question, "Is that the right approach?" Do we need to review the dashboard.css to find things that need to be moved to theme specific stylesheets?

Also see #790650: Dashboard always appears in drag-and-drop mode when Seven is not used (and on 404 pages).... The dashboard functionality is broken outside Seven as well, and I think that might be theme-related.

I created a separate issue for the overlay tabs problem:
#790732: The overlay tabs and close button look like a minor train wreck in themes without a white background

It's a tricky one, though.

I'm pretty sure this is going to have to wait until 8.x.

Why Drupal 8?

Maybe we can't fix all of it in Drupal 7 but at least parts of this (for example, the complete lack of styling for the "Done" link) are straight-up bugs. That was even noted by @webchick in a relatively recent review as a please-make-sure-there-is-a-follow-up-issue-for-this kind of problem (#601932-202: Allow dashboard to limit available blocks) :) If even some core themes aren't providing styling for the "button" class, we shouldn't be relying on it.

Here is an attempt to fix some of the more egregious styling problems in non-Seven themes without going overboard. Obviously there is a lot of room for improvement in Drupal 8 still.

7.x of course, are we tying our hands for two years on an issue that will make life harder for administration theme developers for a whole release?