Minimal Paper is the theme I am developing for this website. Originally I did not plan to develop my own Hugo theme, but after browsing for an extended period of time and looking at almost all Hugo themes, I did not quite find what I wanted. And instead of settling with the best option I found, I came to the logical conclusion to develop my own theme 😅.

After the first hill of the learning curve was managed, developing my own theme is actually quite an enjoyable process! Hugo is so approachable and easy to learn, that most things are quick to implement. And the powerful features of shortcodes and partials make it super easy to implement your own custom content.

Overview

Inspiration

This themes takes inspiration from multiple influences and melts them together. As the theme is currently still in active development, take the below influences lightly.

Digital Minimalism

This aesthetic keeps things clean, simple, readable. This style does not use excessive animations, shadows, 3D-effects and does not overload with content. It has been and still is pioneered by tech-enthusiasts. Its visual language can be found in many websites and graphic design work. One of my inspirations is Anders Norén, who designs exceptional wordpress themes.

Small Internet

Another strand of influcence comes from the small web or the small internet. This nostalgic term describes the internet how it used to be before social media took over: Most businesses, organizations and digital people created their own little websites with a personal touch and a distinct feel. A lot of them were also quite playful and in a way quite lovely. This ecosystem of small pages still exist, but it got more rare. Inspirations include マリウス and tobiasfried.com.

Paper Aesthetic

The third influence is some kind of paper or typewriter aesthetic. I am also still figuring out what I mean by this, but let me try to explain. I really love a good clean minimal journal style. Take e.g. a Moleskine Journal and write with black fine ink on the paper, keep good margins and add some illustrations. This looks just wonderful.

Same goes for papers written with a typewriter or printed products with a clean typography and design in mind. For me, they are visually very pleasing.

What do these paper-centric styles have in common? They have a fixed and relatively narrow width (constrained by the paper), content that extends to the bottom, generous margins around the content, high contrast and a clear structure.

There is just something timeless about paper that appeals to me. And clearly not only to me, as you can find it in many places across the web. One of the most dominant examples might be Notion with its minimal and paper-like design language. But the examples I like to give are julian.digital and helenazhang.com, which look like a printed paper or newspaper respectively.

Development Roadmap

Here is a growing colleciton of ideas for this theme:

• Implement proper captions for photos -> done with image shortcode in 0.1.2
• callout boxes as shortcode (guide) -> done in 0.1.3
• Make link jumps via #heading have a margin at the top, so it looks better -> done in 0.1.5
• table of content support –> Implemented as shortcode in 0.1.6
• Seperate theme into seperate repository -> done with 0.2.0
• Style divider line --- to better fit the theme -> done with 0.2.2
• Implement tags to use as little inline callout boxes -> done with 0.2.3
• Rework CSS color variables to be fully global
• Extend img-row shortcode to contain width and captions
• Minimalistic Lightbox
• Light and Darkmode switch
• Color Palette Switcher
• fontawesome icon support
• Allow pictures to be wider than content
• Simple gallery via shortcode (for inspiration, see here)