Pastel

A chalk palette on toned stone paper.

What the pastel brand gives a Quarto site, how to point a project at it, and where its colours may and may not be used.
Author

Mickaël CANOUIL, Ph.D.

A palette of two or three colours reads as corporate; a palette of six bright ones reads as a toy.

pastel is six sticks greyed back to roughly a fifth or a third of full saturation, so the family stays cheerful and still reads as chalk. It ships as a brand.yml and a stylesheet: the first gives the colours, the second spends them across the page.

The site you are reading is themed by it.

Installation

quarto add mcanouil/quarto-pastel@0.1.1

This will install the extension under the _extensions subdirectory. If you are using version control, you will want to check in this directory.

Or install it from your editor with Quarto Wizard:

Visual Studio Code Positron VSCodium

Quick start

Point the project at the brand, and add the stylesheet to both schemes:

brand: _extensions/mcanouil/pastel/brand.yml
format:
  atelier-html:
    theme:
      light:
        - brand
        - _extensions/mcanouil/pastel/pastel.scss
      dark:
        - brand
        - _extensions/mcanouil/pastel/pastel.scss

brand.yml alone gives the palette. pastel.scss spends it: the paper tooth, the heading hues, the inline-code blush, the callout, tabset, table, and blockquote tints, and a tinted contents panel with a real active state.

The page chrome is left to atelier, which derives the navbar, footer, and docked sidebar from the same brand.

The one rule

Important

The pastels measure between 1.20 and 1.65 against the light paper, which is below even the 3:1 asked of interface elements.

In the light scheme they are decoration only: fills and tints, never text, and never a border the page depends on. In dark mode the relationship inverts and the pastels become the ink.

See the Reference for the palette and its measurements, and the Examples for the colours in use.

Where it works

HTML output. It has no effect on PDF, Typst, or Word.

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