you need to use Firebug or other browser developer tools to inspect the element and find out what style rules are being applied to it. For your custom style rule to override a style rule in style.css, your rule needs to be more specific and it needs to be lower in the resulting css (ie in a file below style.css in the list of files in style.config). You also need to consider whether css caching is preventing your changes from being visible.
Hope that helps,
Joe