Example screenshots of Alembic theme on desktop and mobile

Alembic theme for Jekyll

A powerful open source theme

After the success of Garth I wanted to create a theme that could harness the full power of what Jekyll, and other linked, looks had to offer. Alembic is a theme that has the ability to be used straight out of the box as well as a strong basis for any type of content based site.

Starting over

Rather than building upon a theme I already had I thought it would be more sensible to start a fresh than saturate my simple blog theme with a bunch of extra tooling. Alembic was my chance to experiment and establish techniques that utilised as much as Jekyll had to offer, as well as other tools that could integrate with static sites.

Skills involved

  • Typography
  • Long form design
  • Integrations
  • Open-source development
  • Front-end development

Designing a framework

I wanted to make Alembic be suitable for a wide range of content sites, from documentation sites and long form content to promotional and “front of house” sites. It would need to work with no changes and work with full customisation.

Making it accessible

Creating UI that anyone can navigate and consume is something to be proud of. The idea that I could help assist multiple sites to be more accessible from the beginning was an exciting prospect. Alembic has been through several stages of accessibility testing to improve navigation, readability and interaction.

Screenshot of an example blog post

Platform agnostic

The JAMstack community has grown incredibly over the last couple of years, with new tools coming out continuously. I wanted Alembic to be compatible with many of these tools. I have created starter repos so Alembic can be deployed to Netlify, linked to Forestry, linked to Netlify CMS all with merely a few button clicks.

Testimonials

I used the theme for a customer.
Really happy about how fast, and easy to customize, it is!
Kristian Nordestgaard
I mainly like the clean and structured design, thereby allowing slight modifications, such as text / headlines with custom css in the header images or placing images next to text
Jonas Höchst
I love this Alembic theme for its simple, elegant, and easy-to-customize design. It also has several setting modes to fit with different screen sizes. The blog and its search feature is extremely helpful for someone who uses Alembic to create personal homepage.
Ta Quang Trung

The result

Alembic has been downloaded from RubyGems.org over 68,464 times, has under 500 stars and forks on GitHub. It’s now reached version 3 but I continue to improve its quality, either by working on it myself or assisting contributors in providing improvements.