A fresh coat of paint and a new color theme

Introduction

If you've been on this website before, you might notice it's looking a wee bit different. That's because there's a completely new theme and even a reorganized homepage!

When I feel stressed, I find tinkering with this website a very relaxing activity. There's always something to do, some design improvement that can be done. My only issue is that I suck at design. I can implement fine, I've been playing with HTML and CSS for half my life at this point.¹ But I lack the vision, and particularly I lack the tools to make whatever looks good to me into a reality. Mockups, logos, I don't have any skill there...

This is where AI comes in. I know, I know, using AI to be creative is just sad. But I'm a big proponent of using AI for things you wouldn't do anyway. I wasn't gonna hire a designer for a personal website, I wasn't gonna figure out a nice mockup myself. To me, this is where it shines: it opens a world I was closing myself off from.

Blåhaj: a new color theme

The new design is very ocean, arctic, cold inspired. I don't know if it's because it's finally close to 2 °C here in Amsterdam and I spend a large portion of my days walking my cute dog in this cold, or if it's because blue is my favourite color. But it all started when I found this gorgeous wallpaper featuring the Blåhaj!

If you don't know what a Blåhaj is, there you go, it's the famous shark plushie from IKEA. No, this is not a covert ad. I do not make a cent if you buy a plushie, and if I wanted to make you buy IKEA stuff, I would aim for more expensive (go buyyyy a kiiiitcheeeen). My wife and I bought one of these sharks when we moved in together and he's been a part of the family ever since.²

So, oceanic, even arctic theme. How do we get there? That's where AI comes to the rescue. First, ChatGPT did a good job of pointing me in the right direction, and it even came up with the chibi Blåhaj you can find on the homepage and on the 404 page. Though I have to admit this is also where AI falls short: there's no easy way for me to generate more in this exact style afaik... I then turned to Claude because I've seen how great it is at website mockups for my wife's marketing work (and all this was on the free version too!). And I wasn't disappointed. It quickly came up with a mockup of my homepage which triggered my inspiration. I didn't end up using the full mockup. My goal was never to have AI do the whole thing, but having it help me visualize and iterate was a wonderful step.

The last thing I really wanted was a matching color scheme for my code blocks. I've been thinking about creating a matching palette and color scheme for a while à la Catppuccin, but turns out this is really hard... DeepSeek came to my rescue here and did a really good job (which thankfully wasn't too hard once the theme colors for the website were chosen). There was a lot of back and forth to make sure it looked good (contrast can really be a bitch) but I'm quite happy with the outcome.

If you like this theme, you can find the link at the beginning of this post, with VS Code, Zed, Ghostty as well as all the raw colors. Enjoy!