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.
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
What's included
- Screens: the home cover, desk fronts with pagination, the article, the colophon, 404 and the feed
- Three article formats: a report with the rail beside it, a brief with the rail under it, and a photo essay that gives the page to the picture
- Type-safe content collections for articles, desks and contributors, in Markdown or MDX
- Feed, sitemap, robots.txt, JSON-LD, Open Graph metadata, and an analytics slot (Plausible, GA4, Umami)
- 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
- MIT, with one footer credit line that is easy to remove
Halftone Pro adds the second axis — series, tags and a tag index, contributor pages and an archive by year — with Pagefind search, i18n routing, a loaded rail, drawn share cards, four colour presets and three cover-line layouts. Pro demo: https://halftone.ondelva.com
