01. Installing Obsidian

02. Create a vault

A vault is essentially a single Obsidian instance.
You can have multiple vaults, and they don’t talk to each other - they’re separate.
Each vault can be set up differently, e.g., different aesthetic theme, etc
The “common wisdom” is that you should only have 1 Obsidian vault. I have recently decided that this is totally wrong! I have:
- A new one for my contractor job
- One called “2025” which is kind of a chaotic dump
- One for this website
- Etc
I think separation of concerns is very nice for reduced cognitive load)
- You can have a different theme for each vault, so you automatically know where you are. I find this to be very nice
However, for the purposes of this guide, we’re just making one vault

I’d recommend choosing a nice theme!
Unlike the website front-end (Quartz), where I don’t care about the theme, I think the Obsidian desktop theme matters, because it’s what you’ll be looking at as you write
Also, unlike Quartz, where changing the aesthetic involves altering the CSS file(s) yourself, Obsidian has a built-in theme gallery - you just find one you like an install it, easy
Press “command/control + ,” to go to the settings (or, click the cog)
Go to appearance → themes → manage
Now you can browse the themes
Here are the themes I use:

☝️ Pink Topaz, for my website vault. I like a “light mode” theme, but hate staring at bright white, so I found this one to be a nice soft pink and sepia vibe, feels conducive to writng

The below are quality of life things
But they’re probably not worth bothering with until you find that your life is lacking quality due to little niggles
I would probably recommend pausing here, enjoying your pretty Obsidian, and writing something
Then, Obsidian Guide - Phase 2 - A slightly more intentional infrastructure