Ever since switching from Ghost about a year ago I’ve been using a (admittedly lovely) 3rd party theme, which was a departure from my prior experience of designing my own site themes for Ghost (and before that both Wordpress and my own custom blog solution). I’m not a huge fan of working with HTML/CSS (or theming in general), but I do get a certain sense of satisfaction from creating and running my own designs.

Since a year is now approaching of Jekyll+Github Pages I felt it was finally time to create a new design I was happy with using. The result is a theme I call ‘Isla’.

The name is an homage to the character Isla, a character from the anime Plastic Memories. The colour palette focuses on off-white and blacks, with muted red, blue and turquoise highlights; the palette itself is derived from Isla’s character design as well as the Plastic Memories logo design. The highlights are almost just flecks of colour in a dominating muted greyscale theme.

Font choice is Jura, as I was looking for a readable font that focused on straight lines while keeping smooth corners, again to resemble the font design used in the Plastic Memories logo.

The layout utilises the popular & well received page with left-sidebar format, with practically all layout handled by bootstrap 4. Syntax highlighting is of course also included, along with Disqus comments integration.

It’s also JavaScript free except for Google Analytics and Disqus comments.

I’m quite happy with the overall result; a bright, clean theme that doesn’t burn the eyes; with consistency across all pages and simple navigation.

You can find the theme here on github: http://github.com/galaco/isla