How I built the Typeset custom theme for this website

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:45:00 +0000

I’ve been running this site on Hugo for several years now, and for most of that time I used other people’s themes and tweaked things around the edges. A few months ago, I decided to build my own theme from scratch with Claude Code. The theme is called Typeset.

Why build a custom theme?

The short answer: I got tired of fighting someone else’s decisions. Every borrowed theme comes with assumptions about what a blog is and what it should look like. Eventually those assumptions start getting in the way.

css colour themer

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0700

css colour themer

A screenshot of the CSS Colour Themer tool displaying extracted color palettes and generated CSS variable assignments for website theme customization.

Css on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

How I built the Typeset custom theme for this website

Why build a custom theme?

css colour themer

css colour themer