Four Palettes, One Accent

The theme has two colour switches and they are independent of each other. That is the only unusual thing about its palette system, and it is worth five minutes of explanation because almost every customisation question turns out to be about it.

The two switches

Theme is light or dark, toggled by the ☾/☀ button in the nav. Ground is brown or green, toggled from the footer. Neither knows about the other, so the combinations are:

Theme	Ground	Surface
dark	brown	warm near-black
dark	green	deep green-black
light	brown	cream
light	green	ivory

Both are written to localStorage and applied synchronously in <head>, so there is no flash of the wrong palette on a reload. A visitor’s own toggle always beats your configured default.

Setting the default

yaml

params:
  ground: "brown"        # brown | green
  defaultTheme: "auto"   # dark | light | auto

auto follows prefers-color-scheme. The other two force a first impression — and only a first impression, since the toggle is remembered from then on.

The accent, and the rule that constrains it

The accent is a single colour, used for the kicker above a post title, links in prose, focus rings, and the second half of each typed masthead line. You set it once:

yaml

params:
  accent: "#e8b04b"     # dark mode
  accentLight: ""       # light mode; empty derives a darkened variant

Here is the part that catches people out. A colour that reads beautifully as accent text on a near-black surface will usually fail contrast on cream. So the theme keeps two values, and if you leave accentLight empty it derives a darkened variant of your accent for light mode.

Adding a pair of your own

Four accents ship with a matching light variant already worked out:

code

mustard  #e8b04b  →  #9a5b12
copper   #d97b4f  →  #a8451f
green    #0f766e  →  #0f766e
sky      #8fb8d6  →  #2f6b95

To add a fifth, pick your dark accent, then darken it until it clears 4.5:1 on #faf6ef, and set both values explicitly. The green pair is identical in both modes — that happens when a colour is already dark enough to work on cream, and it is the exception rather than the thing to aim for.