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Day 1: Learning & Using GitHub, Building my Design Log

Good design is rarely a straight line. It’s a series of small bets, course corrections, and occasional breakthroughs. This log is an attempt to document that process honestly – not just the wins, but the reasoning behind every turn.

What I Did

Completed the GitHub Pages course on skills.github.com and used it as the foundation for a personal design log. The goal is to document design decisions, iterations, and lessons learned across projects.

What I Built

  1. A home page (index.md) with:
    • A short statement of intent for the log
    • A table-based entry index (date, project, topic)
    • Topic navigation links
    • An about section with profile photo and links

What I Learned

  1. Pure markdown can’t handle inline/float layouts – you need inline HTML for anything involving image positioning
  2. GitHub Pages renders inline HTML in .md files without issue
  3. object-fit: cover is the right tool for forcing an image into a fixed box without distortion
  4. alt text on a profile photo should describe the person, not just say “profile photo”

Setting Up the Blog

Configuration

Set up _config.yml with title, author, description, and theme. Iterated through Hacker and Midnight themes before settling on a fully custom CSS override for precise control over the palette and typography.

Theme and Styling

Chose DM Sans from Google Fonts as a clean, warm alternative to Proxima Nova. Built a custom stylesheet at assets/css/style.scss using a warm dark palette:

Posts and Routing

Jekyll compiles _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-title.md into /YYYY/MM/DD/title.html, preserving filename casing. The GitHub Pages build action hardcodes future: false regardless of _config.yml, so posts must use a current or past date to build.

Links in index.md must use relative paths without a leading slash to resolve correctly against the repo base path rather than the domain root.

Files