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theme, written down
Our Theme · The Look and Feel of E2
This is the E2 theme: the colors, the mood, and the ideas every E2 page follows. The template page holds the exact frame and specs. This page holds the thinking behind them, so anyone can talk about our theme, question it, and help it get better.
The Themes
E2 exists to imagine a kinder world. The design has to feel like that before a single word is read: warm, welcoming, room for everybody, nobody shouted at, nobody trapped.
White space, big friendly type, rounded buttons, and real sunshine in the palette. If a page starts to feel like a bank or a dashboard, it has left the theme.
E2 is people and characters, not abstract software. Faces, names, who is online right now, who made this: the human layer is the design, not decoration on top of it.
Games, bounties, llamas, and jokes are welcome. Money, prizes, and promises are always stated plainly and exactly. Play with everything except the truth.
Pages should feel instant, our house target is 0.75 seconds, 0.5 on a good day. No heavy frameworks, no popups, no sticky bars covering what you came to read. The header scrolls away with the page.
Counts, faces, and feeds on E2 pages are read live when the page loads, never typed into the page where they can go stale. A theme of a living town has to actually be alive.
The Palette
The main action: Join, the bounty call, the one button that matters most on the screen. Sunshine, prize money, optimism.
Links, hovers, and the second accent. Trust, water, the way through to the next page.
Headlines and body text. Nearly black, softer than pure black.
The ground everything sits on. Clean, bright, lots of air.
Quiet labels, eyebrows, and secondary text that should whisper, not shout.
One open question, parked on purpose: whether gold or blue should be THE single primary color across every site in the family. For now each has its job above. When we agree an official cross-site theme, this page is where it will be written down first.
E2 is the sunny town square. Its sister university, Starvard, wears navy and gold: same honesty, same speed, a quieter, more bookish mood. The two themes are cousins, not twins.
Talk About It
If a page feels like E2 to you, or a page feels off theme, tell us in the E2 Discord. Theme feedback is real feedback, not decoration.
New pages start from the master template, then follow the themes above. Content is yours, the frame and the mood are shared.
When the theme changes, we change it here first, then restamp the template and the pages. No quiet drift, no page inventing its own look.
Kind on purpose, sunny on purpose. Built to be enjoyed.