When I started using Beautiful-Jekyll, I really enjoyed the airy, modern feel of the layout. Then I looked around a little at other sites using the same theme … and they all looked exactly like my site. There was absolutely no personal touch.

Since this is, indeed, my personal site, and my readers deserve an idea of what sort of designer I am, I’ve been busy working on the CSS styling.

The basic layout is still standard Beautiful-Jekyll, but I’ve been playing with typefaces, colors, and spacing to make the site feel a little more like home.

This has been pretty easy, overall, though Jekyll has styling spread out across multiple files, so it’s sometimes been a hunt to find where I need to go to change things.

For example, if you want to specify a Google font, you need to put the link to the stylesheet in the layouts directory, then call it in the CSS file or in the frontmatter. Also, inter-paragraph spacing involves messing with CSS and the parser.