August is a personal and portfolio theme for designers, makers, and small studios whose site should feel made, not generated. It renders as an interactive design canvas: a faint working grid, sticker notes, a live clock, polaroids, selection-handle frames, a stacking folder-card case-study deck, and a click-to-open lightbox gallery. Slack-bright candy accents (cyan, magenta, amber, green) sit on clean paper with a bold display face, DM Mono labels, and a handwritten accent. A sun/moon switch in the nav flips between light and dark variants and remembers each visitor's choice with no flash on load.
Built on Astro 7 + Tailwind v4 with TypeScript. Every section reads from a single config file, so branding the site is a one-file edit - no component changes needed.
Who it's for
- Product, brand, and UX designers
- Freelancers and independent studios
- Developers and makers who want a personal home
- Anyone who wants a portfolio with a point of view
- Lightly reskinned: a SaaS or solo-founder landing page
What's distinctive
- Interactive design canvas - a faint working grid and ruler, sticker notes, a live clock, polaroids, and selection-handle frames that make the page feel like an open design file
- Stacking case-study deck - folder-style cards that stack on scroll via CSS sticky positioning, with per-project color, no JS animation library required
- Lightbox gallery - a framed playground grid where tiles open full-screen with prev/next and keyboard navigation
- Light + dark variants - sun/moon toggle in the nav, preference persists per visitor in localStorage, pre-paint script prevents FOUC
- A bold display face for headlines, DM Mono for labels, and a handwritten accent, on clean paper with Slack-bright candy accents (cyan, magenta, amber, green)
- Career timeline, stats band, testimonials, and a "worked with" clients marquee
- Section-level fade-in on scroll, reduced-motion aware
What's included
- Full source: Astro 7 + Tailwind v4 + TypeScript
- 9 page templates: Home, About, Case Study index + Case Study detail, Playground gallery, Journal index + Journal post, Contact, 404
- ~17 reusable sections you can rearrange
- One-file config at src/config/site.ts (no code changes needed for branding)
- Markdown content collections for case studies and journal posts
- Contact + Newsletter components wired to Formspree, FormSubmit, Netlify Forms, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and Buttondown
- Built-in light/dark toggle with no flash on load
- Deploy configs for Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages
- Lifetime updates for this theme
- Documentation at aerolaunch.app/docs/themes/august
