My personal site has been running on Hugo with the PaperMod theme for a while now. It worked fine — clean, fast, readable — but it also looked like roughly ten thousand other Hugo sites on the internet. No real personality, no visual identity. Just a list of posts and a default color scheme. Time to change that.
I decided to work through it with Claude, starting from a simple question: what can we actually do here without rebuilding everything from scratch? The answer turned out to be quite a lot. We started with a custom CSS file — a single file that overrides PaperMod’s defaults without touching the theme itself, meaning future theme updates won’t wipe my changes. In went a bold orange accent color and a new font pairing: Syne for headings, DM Sans for body text. Two changes that sound small but immediately made the site feel like mine. After that, we switched the homepage to PaperMod’s profile mode, replacing the plain text intro with a proper landing block. Finally, adding cover images to posts transformed the post list from a wall of text into something that actually invites you to read.
The whole process took less than an hour and required no real coding — just editing a CSS file and a YAML config. What I found most useful was having something to bounce ideas off, get exact copy-paste snippets from, and check my work against. If your own Hugo site is sitting there looking a bit unloved, this is a very low-risk way to give it some character.