# Styling the sidebar without using CSS?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/styling-the-sidebar-without-using-css/279050>\
**Category:** Support\
**Created:** [September 14, 2023, 7:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/styling-the-sidebar-without-using-css/279050 "2023-09-14T19:04:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![MarximusMG](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/marximusmg/32/142127_2.png) [@MarximusMG](https://meta.discourse.org/u/MarximusMG)\
**Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 4:51pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/styling-the-sidebar-without-using-css/279050/4 "2023-09-20T16:51:58Z")

</div>

Gotcha! I’ve customized my Discourse install quite a bit, so I haven’t used the auto update in the admin dashboard to upgrade from 3.1.0 to 3.2.0.

I’ll be spending some time shortly to update to 3.2.0 and hopefully that will bring the styling in line with the default styling.

Specifically, I was wanting to increase the font size of the category titles, as well as change the sidebar background color to #FFFFFF.

On this topic of sidebar customization, I’m also curious to know if there’s any way to replace the bullet visual style for the category badges with emojis?

For instance instead of the standard:

 ![Screenshot 2023-09-20 at 10.51.18 AM](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/4/f/e/4fe8bffca6eeb532b75255f32f761ef23f4973c2.png)

replacing the colorized bullets with an emoji like this:

 ![Screenshot 2023-09-20 at 10.46.49 AM](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/5/e/7/5e75f3197f5d891eae625720d5750b297c251853.jpeg)

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/styling-the-sidebar-without-using-css/279050)._