1.9 Obsidian Design Tokens & Themes

The Standard Garden Obsidian plugin turns frontmatter metadata into a live, typographic design system. You can style individual notes or your entire workspace using bare frontmatter keys that map directly to CSS variables with zero abstraction.

1. How Tokens Work

The plugin reads frontmatter keys in the active note, checks them against the canonical token dictionary, and injects a matching CSS variable with !important onto html body:

---
font-text: "EB Garamond"
optical-ratio: 1.25
color-light-accent: "#b45309"
---

Translates at runtime directly to:

html body {
  --font-text: "EB Garamond" !important;
  --optical-ratio: 1.25 !important;
  --color-light-accent: #b45309 !important;
}

The key name is the CSS property name minus the -- prefix. No namespace prefix, no extra configuration.

2. Built-in Curated Themes

Standard Garden includes 27+ curated themes crafted for typography and long-form reading. You can activate a theme globally in plugin settings or apply it to a single note:

---
theme: humanist
---

Popular Themes

You can also switch themes dynamically using the command palette: Standard Garden: Set note theme or by clicking Let’s Hyphe design this in the side panel to generate a custom palette tailored to your note’s subject matter.

3. Typography Tokens

Active when Settings → Standard Garden → Design System is enabled.

4. Color Tokens

Light Theme Palettes

Dark Theme Palettes

The dark mode palette mirrors the exact same structure: replace -light- with -dark- (e.g., color-dark-background, color-dark-foreground, color-dark-accent). Both sets can live simultaneously in the same note, adapting automatically when Obsidian toggles between light and dark modes.

5. Fine Color Control

You can also target specific semantic elements regardless of theme mode:

See Also

• The Obsidian Atelier — installation, sync, and publication workflow
• CSS & Rendering Hooks — classes injected onto notes for custom stylesheets
• Styling the Soil — full frontmatter metadata reference