Building themes

This week I’ve been writing about building themes for a new module in Practical Hugo. It’s made me think about my own. As a result I’ve spent time tidying up my personal site, pulling out unused styles, making small adjustments to the design and reducing complexity where I can.

I’ve built a bunch of Hugo themes over the years, usually for clients or personal projects. But, I’ve never actually open-sourced one for others to use. I’m not sure why that is. It seems bizarre that I haven’t, now I come to think of it. This year I want to change that by sharing a couple of free themes with the community.

The obvious place to start is with my personal site. I’ve given the theme away a few times in the past, when folk have emailed asking if they can use it. So perhaps it’s time to put it out there, for others to use.

I’ve also been working on my old moodboard theme. It’s not your typical Hugo theme given the content is mainly visual–single pages feel more like an old lightbox gallery, except there’s no JavaScript involved.

I removed lazysizes.js to continue in this vain, opting for native lazy loading with low quality image placeholders instead. Now we’re 100% JavaScript free and there’s an air of wabi-sabi about it. No animation or any other non-essentials. It light and a little rough around the edges, which I’ve come to like.