Cayman

Cayman is GitHub’s own flagship Jekyll theme and the most widely deployed project landing page template on the entire internet. With its distinctive teal-to-blue gradient header, clean white content area, and minimal dependency footprint, it has become the recognisable face of thousands of open source libraries, tools, and frameworks.

The theme was designed to serve one purpose exceptionally well: presenting an open source project to the world. When you enable GitHub Pages on a repository using Cayman, the site automatically inherits your project’s name, description, and repository URL, populating the header and the three action buttons — Download ZIP, Download TAR, and View on GitHub — without any configuration. Fork it, enable Pages, and your project has a professional landing page in two minutes.

The hero header is the theme’s signature element: a full-width gradient panel containing your project name and tagline in large, clear type, followed by the three call-to-action buttons. Below it, the body of your README.md (or any Markdown file) renders into a comfortable single-column reading layout with generous padding and a carefully chosen system font stack that looks great on every operating system.

Cayman’s simplicity is its greatest strength. There is no build process beyond Jekyll itself, no npm dependencies, no Webpack config. The stylesheet is a few hundred lines of plain CSS. If you need to extend or override anything, there is nothing standing in your way.

Who is it for? Open source maintainers who need a professional project landing page on GitHub Pages in minutes, with zero setup friction.