Halftone is an Astro theme for a newsmagazine where the photograph is the hierarchy. The home page is a cover plate — one large picture carrying the wordmark, the lead headline and the cover lines — and every desk front is built the same way.
Everything in the free edition, and the apparatus a magazine needs once it has more than a front page
- The second axis: series, tags and a tag index, contributor pages, an archive by year
- Pagefind search over the article bodies, built at build time
- The rail, fully loaded: a contents list built from the subheads, series navigation, figures
- i18n routing, a language switch and a per-article lang
- Share cards drawn at build time for the pages that carry no photograph
- Four colour presets, three font pairings, three cover-line layouts
- MDX components: callout, pull quote, a table of figures with the proportions drawn in
- Newsletter (Buttondown, Kit), giscus comments, a contact form (Web3Forms) — each behind a switch
- Commercial licence, unlimited end products, email support
How it reads
- Schibsted Grotesk for the wordmark and the headlines, Spectral for text at about 68 characters a line, IBM Plex Mono for kickers, folios and photo credits
- The cover line: a kicker box, a headline and a short deck, stacked down the plate and divided by a rule and a single +
- One spot colour, printed as a field on the wordmark and the kicker boxes; square corners, rules instead of cards
- Dark mode, and a layout that holds down to 360px
- Nineteen sample photographs under public-domain, CC0 or CC BY licences, credited on the plate
- AGENTS.md, a map of the edit points for Claude Code and Cursor
License and support: $49 for one person, $129 for a team of up to ten — a commercial licence for unlimited end products, the source through GitHub and a zip download, every 1.x update, and email support. 14-day refund. A free MIT edition is also available: https://github.com/ondelva/astro-theme-halftone
