As I started writing those Google Code Jam posts, I grew unsatisfied with the blockquote option offered by the current theme: walls of text was set in big, italic typefaces. Not the most readable choice.
Post Style Fixes
Upon further inspection, however, it turned out that the problem does not lie in the theme, but my understanding of blockquotes: quoting a problem statement is definitely not an appropriate usage for blockquotes.
A temporary fix for those problem statements is that I turned them into plain text paragraphs. It looked much less distracting, but it also made it harder to tell between the problem and the answer.
Further solutions might include a table, a different background color, or an accordion. However, as I am weary of fixing old stuff again and again, I want to take more time to decide on that one.
Typography Test Page
As making adjustments to the theme will probably become a new normal, it might be useful if I have a benchmark, a unified place to see all the changes to happen. Hence, I started a test page. Since as of now I only concentrate on blockquotes, there are only blockquotes in it at the moment. But in the future I could reuse this page to include more examples.
There is also a page for similar purposes created by the creators of the theme. It includes more stuff, and is part of the inspiration for my creation of the test page. However, seeing the test page in my particular configuration might be useful. And I might some day include stuff not included by the upstream one.
“cite” Field
A curiosity I noticed when creating that test page is that blockquotes can have an <cite> field, which usually represents the source or author of the quotation.
In default Kahuna, the quotation itself is in a big, italic and serif font, and the citation is in smaller, upright, all-capital setting of the same font. The kind of serif typeface they have in mind is Georgia or Charter — both featuring strong and even exaggerated serifs, which can probably compensate for the smaller font size nicely.
In contrast, the typeface I am using, Adagio Serif, does not feature very strong serifs. Hence, the smaller letters really look weaker and lighter.
I changed the block quote typeface to slightly lighter, and adjusted letter spacing and font size to balance the citation and the quotation. I feel I ended up with a more interesting kind of contrast than before.