the old look had to go
I've been staring at this blog for months now and something never sat right. It looked like every other markdown-to-html blog template out there. Fine typography, fine spacing, completely forgettable. Could've been anyone's site.
I wanted it to look like mine.
why green
No real debate here honestly. I just like green. Moss, spruce, that dull green you get on rocks near the water. It felt like the right base color before I even had a plan for the rest of it.
making it feel like here
The idea that stuck was: what if the site looked like Lovund instead of looking like a design system. Not literally, I'm not putting fjord photos in the background, but the feeling of it. Muted colors, something a little weathered, less "SaaS landing page" and more somewhere you'd actually want to sit and read.
first pass, paper and serif
Started with the type. Switched the body font to Literata, a serif made for reading long text, and it did more work than I expected. A plain paragraph suddenly looked like it belonged in a book instead of a UI mockup.
Then the background. Went with a warm, slightly mossy off-white instead of pure white, kind of like paper that's been sitting in a cabin for a few years. Paired with a darker green for headings and links and it already looked like a different site.
Whole thing came down to swapping four CSS variables, which felt almost anticlimactic given how different the site looks now. Started from whatever the starter kit had, some default blue that told you nothing about who wrote the thing:
/* what was already there */
@theme {
--font-body: ui-sans-serif, system-ui, sans-serif;
--color-bg: #ffffff;
--color-fg: #1a1a1a;
--color-accent-500: #3b82f6;
}@theme {
--font-body: 'Literata', ui-serif, Georgia, serif;
--color-bg: #ecf3ee;
--color-fg: #141c18;
--color-accent-500: #2f6b45;
}Nothing else changed yet. No new layout, no pixel art, none of that. Just fonts and color. But it was the first time in a while I opened this site and thought, okay, that's actually mine.
More coming this week. I've got ideas for the header that are going to take way longer than they should, and I'm already sketching things on paper instead of just doing them straight in the browser like usual.