The brief I gave myself was a 24th-century console but disciplined – no cheap LCARS knockoff, no rounded plastic chrome. Everything’s driven by a single block of CSS custom properties at the top of theme.css – bronze metals, amber accents, void backgrounds, a measured spacing scale.
Type stack is three families. Cinzel for serif display headings and proverbs. Antonio as the condensed display sans for nav and buttons – it does the lifting where I want something that feels engraved. JetBrains Mono for the telemetry-style labels and coordinates. Inter handles body copy. All in one Google Fonts call with display=swap.
The IDIC mark – triangle, inscribed circle, jewel – is inline SVG via a vi_idic_svg() helper, recoloured with currentColor. Reused in the header, footer and hero at different sizes.
Component primitives are small and reusable. .vi-frame with copper corner brackets. .vi-button in its asymmetric pill-and-square shape. .vi-section-label for the monospaced caps. .vi-module for the home-grid cards with the corner brackets that grow on hover – that hover detail is one of my favourite bits tbh.
Third-party plugin output threads through the same tokens. Contact Form 7 ships with its own neutral chrome – I overrode it from the theme so the inputs, placeholders, validation tips and submit button all match the rest of the site. No CF7 styles in the form template itself, just a thin layer in theme.css targeting .wpcf7-form. Means any CF7 form anywhere on the site looks right without per-page fiddling.
Logo went through a redo too. The old one was a stylised V with a flame inside a triangle – fine in isolation but didn’t really sit with the console aesthetic the rest of the site was leaning into. Switched it for a proper IDIC mark instead – that’s the actual symbol of Vulcan philosophy (infinite diversity in infinite combinations) so makes more sense for an Institute named after the planet. Plus inline SVG picks up the theme colours and scales cleanly at any size.
