Why I started this project

I have just started building my own blog website about a month ago and it’s literally done. Even though I spent a lot of time working on it, it doesn’t look really nice. It seemed that I am just stacking a bunch of things in different styles together. It looks fancy, but it’s also superfluous. Some of them are not even good design. For example, there is a circle following the cursor in my site before. Some people complaint that they can’t focus on reading because of thw circle. Indeed, my website has a bad UX.

Also, I found some personal websites that really attracted me due to their graceful and stylish design. I fell in love with the simple and elegant design. I’m kind of a minimalist(not an extreme minimalist) and I searched for a minimal and stylish design language. I found nothing.

Therefore, I decided to create my own design.

How I started

Certainly, I chose Astro as the main tool to build the design website. There are three main reasons why I chose Astro:

1. Astro is the fastest SSG. It’s both friendly for developers and for SEO.
2. The Astro component is fairly easy to read. You can migrate the code from dreen to your own tool such as Hexo or Hugo easily.
3. I’m using Astro as the main tool of my personal website.✌️

The tool I used doesn’t really matter.

I simply created a repo on Github. I hope you can star on Github if you like this theme. I may release something after Dreen is mature enough to face the public.

Its design

As you know, the main aim of Dreen is all about elegance. I wanted to make it simple and minimal. However, I attempted to make my personal website simple but I failed. I can’t guarantee Dreen is going to be minimal.

What is elegance? Is Material Design elegant? I don’t know. But one thing I’m pretty sure about is that Material Design, Ant design or any other mainstream design languages are not aimed for elegance. How can you just make a complicated web application elegant?

Elegance often means simplicity and beauty. What is beauty then? At least we know these are not beautiful:

What are some problems of ugly web pages like the ones above? They all have a bad font. They are using complex and useless images. Their color palettes aren’t nice. They are all showing millions of words in one page even though most of them are not important and users rarely need them. The most important part of the whole page is not big and obvious enough.

How about these ones?

I love it too much. I can’t get rid of it.

And also, it’s time for me to write my own one. That’s why I’m making this.

Let’s go back to the topic.

I’ve been searching for a graceful font for quite a long time. I found the most beautiful Chinese font in the world — LXGW WenKai. Its English font is also amazing. I knew it’s impossible to load a huge Chinese font only for the 26 letters and some punctuations. It’s 5MB!

I found also Ysabeau. I appreciate it, but I know again, it’s not for production due to its readability. They said it’s readable, but why is it not used widely? Maybe it’s just not propagated widely…

Let’s just leave Ysabeau alone. Now I’m using M PLUS Rounded 1c as the sans-serif font and Noto Serif as the serif font. They work well, but not the best. I’m still looking for a better font. If you know any elegant fonts, please tell me about it. Attention, readability is the basic demand.

I love modern effects. I like to use many weird and cool effects on my website. Now I have to restrict the number of them. If they’re not practical and useful enough or they are superfluous, I can’t use them. But honestly, I love them so much and some of them will make your website look more interesting and modern.

More details about Dreen’s design may be written after I made them out.

Open source

To tell you the truth, I was so surprised when I can’t find any elegant design language. If you are also a minimalist, a person who love elegance or even a stranger who just like the appearance of this web page, I’m happy if you can join Dreen and contribute to this graceful theme.

Bye there~