Design tokens, not decoration

Every Quaeris theme ships with a single global.css that opens with a block of custom properties: surfaces, ink, one accent, hairlines, type, radii, spacing. Nothing in the theme is styled outside that vocabulary.

One accent, used sparingly

Most templates fail the same way: too many colors doing too little work. We pick one accent per theme and give it a job — calls to action, active states, selection. Everything else is ink on paper.

Tokens make forks unnecessary

Because components never hard-code a value, restyling a theme means editing one file. Swap the cream for a cool gray, the mustard for a signal red, and the whole catalogue follows — cards, buttons, forms, footer.

Where the hairlines come from

The technical framing you see across the site — hairline rules, + corner markers, container guide lines — is two tokens: --hairline and --plus. Delete them and the theme quietly becomes a plainer, softer site. That is the test of a good system: removing a token degrades gracefully.

Start from the tokens

When you customize a Quaeris theme, resist editing components first. Change the tokens, look at the whole site, then decide what still needs work. Nine times out of ten, nothing does.