Creating a template

Super templates give you the ability to fully customize the appearance of your site using CSS code. The documentation below runs through the entire process.

Overview

Super templates consist of 2 key components: a duplicatable Notion page & Custom code. The best Super templates do not over complicate the use of the original Notion page and use clean, essential-only custom code only to ensure sites stay fast.

Custom Code

Wether you want to add basic adjustments or create an entire custom template, you will need to be comfortable writing CSS code. CSS is a fundamental language of the web and is responsible for adding styles to webpages. This documentation will not teach you how to write the code necessary to create Super templates but we've included a few links below to help you get started.

HTML

Although your template will not be written in HTML, it is important to understand how HTML works in order to be efficient at writing and applying CSS and understanding the structure of a web page. Check out this Introduction to HTML video.

CSS

Most if not all of a Super template is written in CSS. It's important to have a good understanding of this styling language. Check out this Introduction to CSS video.

Starting with a design

The process of template development can be a lot easier if you know how the template will look before you start writing code. Starting in design software also gives you the freedom to make variations, changes and updates to a design much quicker than in development. Some design tools even give you access to the CSS code for elements in your design. Here are some things to consider whilst designing a template:

Design with Notion in mind

All the content on a Super site comes directly from Notion, so a template design should be created with Notion's blocks in mind. The process of creating a template is one of simply changing the appearance of a Notion block and whilst you can essentially 'hack' a Notion block with CSS to make it look however you like, we recommend keeping changes to a minimum and working with aesthetic changes like fonts, color, borders, margins and padding. This ensures that people can still use Notion as expected without breaking the template.

Follow good design practise

The best Super templates all follow good design principles, this includes:

• Keeping typography clear and legible
• Using white space to balance the layout
• Sticking to only 1 or 2 primary colors
• Clutter-free, minimal aesthetic

Creating a Notion page

After the design is done, the next step is to re-create the design as closely as possible using blocks on a Notion page. Super supports most Notion blocks, but you can check here for a full list of compatible blocks. You can be creative with how you use Notion's blocks but try not to modify the layout too drastically. As a loose guide, we suggest using Notion's blocks in the following ways:

• Callout blocks with linked text as Call to Actions or Buttons
• Callout blocks with nested Headings and text as a section
• Gallery collection blocks as visual card-based galleries
• Heading blocks to create a typographic hierarchy
• List collection blocks as a collection of blog posts
• Multiple column blocks to break content up
• Empty blocks to add negative space
• Divider blocks to seperate content

Super Builder

If you want a little help getting started with your Notion page or you are not so proficient with design, check out the Super Builder, a drag-and-drop page builder that works right in Notion.

Create a site on Super

Once you're happy with your Notion page, the next step is to create a site with it on Super.

Please note: although you can preview custom code in the Super dashboard you will need an upgraded/paid account on Super to apply custom code to a live site. This means you can develop your site for free until you are happy and only then do you need to upgrade.

Developer Tools

The developer tools is a Super template developer's best friend. You will want to get familiar with how it works and what it does. Whilst developing Super templates we will mostly use the Developer Tools to traverse and inspect HTML elements and their associated styles in the 'Elements' tab.

Opening the Developer Tools

For these examples we will be working in Google Chrome. In Chrome theres a few ways to open the Developer Tools, first head to your Super Dashboard and open your site's settings (cog icon) so we can view the site preview, then use one of the following methods to open the DevTools. We recommend developing your templates in the preview so you can see live updates.

• View > Developer > Developer Tools
• Cmd + Shift + i (Mac) Ctrl + Shift + i (Windows)
• Three dots > More Tools > Developer Tools
• Right click an element on the page > Inspect

Using the Developer Tools to inspect Elements

Whilst the Developer Tools is open, you can hover over different HTML elements in the 'Elements' tab to highlight them on the website preview. The main reason we use this feature is to find the 'Class Name' of a particular HTML Element so we know what to style.

Super has a full set of CSS Classes that are available to view here. You can refer to this at any point during template development to check a CSS class and what styles are associated with it.

Adding your first styles

Let's customise a block together so you can see how the process works! With the Developer Tools open, we will right click the 'Heading 1' block on the page and choose 'Inspect', this will locate the Element in the Developer Tools window in the 'Elements' tab.

From here, by traversing outward we can see that the main parent Element of the heading is a h1 element with a class of notion-heading. That's all we need to know to apply custom styles to it! However, it's worth noting that if we were to inspect other heading blocks such as a 'Heading 2' block, we would see that this also uses the same class. So by applying styles to notion-heading we would be applying styles to all headings. To avoid this you would need to use a combinator class such as: h1.notion-heading to only apply styles to that class on h1 elements. This is all documented in the Super CSS classes table.

Next, head into the 'Code' page and open the 'CSS' tab so we can start writing some CSS code. Using the class we identified in the previous step, let's write some custom code to change the font weight and font size of the 'Heading 1' block. We recommend using the CSS rule '!important' to ensure that your style overwrites Super's default styles.

h1.notion-heading {
	font-weight: 200!important;
	font-size: 36px!important;
}

Congratulations! You just added your first custom style 🥳 Next, using the same method as above. Let's remove the Notion Header so that our Site looks more like our design.

To recap the process:

1. First, right click an element in the page and choose 'Inspect'
2. Then traverse outward from the element to find the entire Notion header element (main parent)
3. Next copy the class name and paste it into the CSS code box
4. Apply the style using CSS code, in this case we use: display: none!important; to hide the element and it's children.

The process of creating a template is to simply repeat the steps above applying styles class by class until your template is complete. It can seem like a daunting process and creating your first template might take a while but once you get familiar with the workflow and with Super's CSS classes it gets quicker and easier!

In order to apply more complex styles, it's not as simple as just adding some CSS styles to a specific class. In some cases you might want to target a very specific element that does not have its own class. In the next step we'll cover how you can do just that! ↓

Targeting specific blocks and elements

CSS Selectors and Combinators give you the ability to select specific blocks or elements within a block, however they can become quite complex very quickly! Whilst we are not going to cover what Selectors and Combinators are in detail, we will show an example of how they are used in Super Templates below. If you want to follow along with this section you can duplicate this page to your own Notion workspace and create a site with it on Super.

Example

Let's say we have 3 columns but we only want to apply color styles the second column. This is a great use-case for CSS Selectors and Combinators.

Targeting the second column

First we need to identify the CSS class for the element we want to target using the Developer Tools. In our case, it's .notion-column but if we apply color styles to this class, it will affect all of our columns. In order to only select the second column, we need to utilise our first specific selector, the :nth-child() selector. We want to select the second column so we would use :nth-child(2).

.notion-column:nth-child(2) {
	color: #f0bd66!important
}

Targeting the last instance of the second column

However, if we have other column lists with multiple columns inside elsewhere on our page, it will also affect those ones too. What if we only want it to select the last instance of our column in Section 2 on our page?

In order to do this, we need yet more specific CSS selectors. The first step is to identify the common parent HTML elements of both of our column lists. In this case, our next common parent element is .notion-column-list. Then we need to apply a selector to that element to find the last copy of it. To do this we can use the :last-child selector (we could also use :last-of-type), so now our CSS selector becomes: .notion-column-list:last-child.

.notion-column-list:last-child .notion-column:nth-child(2) {
	color: #f0bd66!important
}

Targeting the heading within the first instance of the second column

Great, this works but what if we wanted to only color the heading in our column? We simply need to target the heading element within our column. In this case, we traverse inward and add: .notion-heading.

.notion-root > .notion-column-list .notion-column:nth-child(2) .notion-heading {
	color: #f0bd66!important
}

Awesome! ⚡️ We just covered the basics of CSS Selectors and Combinators and now you should be well on your way to creating your own Super template. CSS Selectors and combinators can take a while to get your head around so be patient with them and if you have issues, you can simply google your problem and look for results on Stackoverflow as many people will have encountered a similar issue before. Check out this video to learn more about CSS Selectors and Combinators.

Template submission guidelines

If you are planning on submitting a template to the Super site, be sure to check out and follow our template submission guidelines.

Feedback, questions or support

If you have any feedback for the documentation above or require extra support. Reach out to us through our Customer Support chat via the Super Dashboard.