Design Notes#
Reason for existence#
Furo exists because, at the time of writing, no existing Sphinx documentation theme quite fit what I wanted. The rough structural elements I wanted were:
Three-column layout, for proper in-page navigation.
Clear navigational sidebar.
Good search.
Good typography.
Good looking design.
Every existing theme either didn’t check all of the boxes above, or tried to do too many things at the same time. There were a few that came close, but nothing really felt quite polished to me.
“Guiding” ideas#
Furo’s design follows a few of the ideas I’ve had discovered over the course of browsing the existing documentation themes across ecosystems and static site generators.
Focus must be on the content.
More stuff is not more good.
Graceful degradation is important, so are niceties.
Simple and good enough, is more than sufficient.
This is for the 80% – don’t need to cover all possible usecases.