mehrshad

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A Persian Palette for an Engineer's Blog

Why this blog is inked with lajvard, firouzeh, and zafaran instead of the default blue-purple gradient, and where each color comes from.

@mehrshad 2026-08-15 2 min read

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Most new sites on the web today share a look: a blue-to-purple gradient, glassy cards, soft shadows. It is the default outfit of a thousand templates. This blog refuses it, on purpose.

Instead the palette is borrowed from Persian tilework, miniature painting, and dye houses. Every color here has a name, a hex code, and a few centuries of use.

The inks

Name Hex Role on this site
Lajvard (lapis) #1C39BB the deep blue, half of the one gradient
Firouzeh (turquoise) #00A693 / #57C5C6 links and accents
Zafaran (saffron) #F38400 numbers, highlights, warnings of importance
Tile azure #0067A5 primary ink on the light theme
Pomegranate #CC3333 reserved for errors

The dark theme is a night of indigo, #0F1420, close to surmaj, the indigo dye used on Persian cloth. The light theme is aged paper, #F6F1E7, the ground of a miniature painting.

One gradient, used twice

Gradients are not banned here; lazy gradients are. Lajvard flowing into firouzeh is the transition you see on Persian domes where the deep blue tiles meet the turquoise band. It appears exactly where a rule line lives, and nowhere else.

Structure over ornament

The typography is IBM Plex, a typeface family drawn for engineering documentation. Metadata, dates, read times, tags: all in Plex Mono, lowercase, set like a title block on a technical drawing. Hairline borders do the work that drop shadows do elsewhere. Sections are numbered 01, 02, 03 the way a drawing sheet numbers its views.

That is the whole system: three inks, one paper, hairlines, and monospace discipline. It rides on the same generator described in the first post. 😄

#design

Mehrshad @mehrshad

Backend engineer (~5 years .NET). Clean Architecture, security, and systems that hold up at scale. Personality between INTJ and ISTJ — S and N at 50/50.

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