Lipi ships with one colour scheme, drawing on the warmth and restraint of the Kami design language. It comes in two modes, light and dark, and it is designed to serve long reading sessions without tiring the eye. This post describes the character of each mode, and then shows how to build named schemes of your own using the same variable system.
Lipi Light↗
The default. The ground is #F5F4ED, a warm off-white that reads as paper under good light rather than as a backlit screen. The foreground is #252523, a near-black with a faint warm undertone that keeps text readable without the harshness of a pure #000000. The single accent is #E85D2A, a terracotta-to-burnt-orange that reads as ink rather than as a notification.
Lipi Light suits long-form essays, travel writing, and personal journals. It is a natural choice for any publication that wants to feel like a printed thing rather than a digital one. The parchment ground reduces eye strain over sustained reading, and the warm neutrals hold their character across a wide range of display calibrations.
Lipi Dark↗
The dark mode inverts the scale without abandoning the warmth. The ground is #141413, a near-black that is warmer than #000 and avoids the flat, screen-like quality of a pure black background. The foreground steps up to #ECEAE2, a warm off-white. The terracotta accent holds across both modes, giving the site a consistent identity whether the reader prefers light or dark.
Lipi Dark suits low-light reading, late-night writing sessions, and any context where the screen needs to recede. It is not a high-contrast dark theme. It is a quiet one, designed for sustained use rather than for visual impact.
Building a Custom Scheme↗
Any named scheme follows the same structure. You define a [data-theme="name"] block in src/styles/theme.css and override only the base tokens that need to change. The semantic layer inherits automatically.
Paper is a cooler, slightly brighter variant suited to note-taking and developer writing. Ground closer to white, neutral foreground, a slate-blue accent. It reads like a legal pad under fluorescent light: clear and unsentimental.
Forest shifts the neutral scale toward a desaturated green. The background gains a slight olive tone, the foreground stays near-black, and the accent moves to a muted sage. It suits nature writing, botanical journals, and any publication that wants to feel grounded rather than archival.
Midnight is the high-contrast companion to Lipi Dark. The background moves to a true near-black (#0D0C0B), the foreground brightens, and the accent warms to a gold-leaning amber. It suits technical writing and developer journals where strong text contrast matters more than reading warmth.
To activate any of these, define a [data-theme] block in theme.css with the tokens you want to override, then set data-theme on the <html> element in your base layout. The rest of the system handles itself.
The full customisation guide covers the exact token names and shows the CSS structure in detail.