Build the visual identity on top of the Academic Pages base, not a new theme

The site looked like every other Academic Pages deployment (Source Serif + Libre Franklin, teal accent, shadowed cards). We decided to keep the Academic Pages base and express a site-wide visual identity by overriding the Sass tokens (type, colour, radius, shadow) in _sass and owning the homepage layout in _layouts/home.html, rather than switching to or writing a custom theme. GitHub Pages’ built-in Jekyll build, the light/dark toggle, Font Awesome and the CV-to-site data sync (Makefile, scripts/) are all wired to this base; a theme swap would cost a week for no gain in identity.

Consequences

• Identity lives in tokens plus the homepage: every new token must be defined for both light and dark themes.
• Other pages keep their structure and change only through tokens.
• Direction chosen: code/kernel texture (monospace labels) and a bilingual signature (郝宇 as the hero’s visual anchor) on an editorial-minimal base; dark-first was rejected.