How to build a Discourse theme similar to forum.cfx.re?

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Hi everyone,

I’m building a Vietnamese community forum using Discourse. I’ve found the layout and style of https://forum.cfx.re very clean, well-structured, and user-friendly.

I’d like to ask for your guidance on how to create a similar layout and theme.

Specifically, I’m trying to achieve:

  1. A homepage layout with categories displayed at the top and latest topics shown below (like categories_and_latest_topics).
  2. Clean category boxes with icons, colors, and brief descriptions – like on forum.cfx.re.
  3. A neat, minimalist design with a lot of white space, similar font styling, and smooth hover effects.
  4. Sidebar or navigation similar to that site (if it’s a plugin or component?).
  5. Recommendations on what theme components or CSS customization would be needed to achieve this look.

So far I’ve tried:

  • Setting desktop category page style to categories_and_latest_topics
  • Installing discourse-category-icons, category-banners, and custom-layouts

But I feel like the overall polish and layout spacing is still different.

Could you please point me in the right direction? Or is there a public theme repository or a theme export for forum.cfx.re?

Thanks in advance for your help!