diff --git a/blog-visual-upgrade.html b/blog-visual-upgrade.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2dcf2cf --- /dev/null +++ b/blog-visual-upgrade.html @@ -0,0 +1,443 @@ + + + + + + + Our Blog Just Got a Visual Upgrade — Here's How We Did It — Tinqs Blog + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ Games + Technology + About + Blog + Contact + Press +
+ + +
+ ← All Posts + 3 June 2026 +

Our Blog Just Got a Visual Upgrade — Here's How We Did It

+

Until yesterday, the Tinqs blog looked... fine. Readable. Semantic. It had the brand amber accent, proper typography, and all the SEO metadata in the right places. But it didn't have much personality. The code blocks were unstyled. The headings sat flat. And the design said "competent" more than "intentional".

+ +
+

Then we looked at our own internal team guide — the onboarding doc we keep at docs/team/dev-basics-env-secrets-git.html. It had gradient titles that clip to transparent. Dark, crisp code panels. Callout boxes with coloured left borders. Pill-shaped date labels. A restrained four-colour palette that felt cohesive without screaming.

+

We wanted the blog to feel like it came from the same shop. So we restyled it.

+

The design source

+

Our team guide is a single self-contained HTML file with a dark theme — background #0d1117, panels #161b22, ink #e6edf3. It uses a four-accent palette:

+ +

The title is the star: an h1 filled with a linear-gradient across all four colours, clipped to the text via -webkit-background-clip: text. Code blocks live in dark #0a0e14 panels with #2a3340 borders. Blockquotes become amber-tinted callouts. The whole thing radiates a "well-maintained developer doc" energy without feeling like a Bootstrap template.

+

We wanted that energy on the public-facing blog.

+

The build system (and why it mattered)

+

The blog is generated by a zero-dependency Node script — build.js — that converts markdown posts into HTML. The pipeline is:

+
posts/*.md  +  _template.html / _index_template.html  →  *.html
+

This means we never touch a generated .html file by hand. Every visual change flows through the two templates. build.js then stamps out all 11 posts plus the index in under a second.

+

The site-wide CSS — navigation, footer, base typography, the brand amber –c-accent: #c9935a — lives in ../style.css, which is served by Git Studio from outside the blog repo. We deliberately did not touch that file. Instead, we injected a self-contained