Azimuth is out

Azimuth is live. It is the second Aftertype theme, and it is for the kind of publication Northline is not: the newsletter that happens to have a website.

In week one I wrote that the email is the product, and the site is the archive and the front door for new subscribers. That stayed the brief all the way through.

Here is what it turned into. The homepage opens with the writer, not a feed. A portrait, a statement, a short intro and a signup field, in that order. Someone who lands there cold should know whose newsletter this is, and how to get it, before they scroll.

Issues are numbered, with dates and an archive page that makes your cadence visible. If numbering doesn’t suit how you publish, it switches off.

The post page got the most attention, because that is where an email link lands. It has a quiet reading column, and an end-of-article block that changes with the reader: a free signup for visitors, an upgrade for free members, a thank-you for paid members. All of that is Ghost’s own Portal and member logic, styled, not replaced.

Around that sit light, dark and auto colour schemes, with a separate logo for dark mode. There is a Start here band built from a tag you choose, so new readers see your best issues first, and a topics index with issue counts. Everything is set in Ghost Admin. No template editing.

Things I left out. No magazine grid, because that is Northline’s job. No page builder. No framework: the theme ships about 2 kB of JavaScript, for the mobile menu and the signup loading state. The fonts load with the theme, not from a third party.

Lighthouse scores accessibility at 100 on the demo, and GScan reports no errors or warnings. Northline taught me to check that before launch, not after.

The demo is still Ida Mercer’s newsletter. She still doesn’t exist. Her layout problems got solved anyway.

Azimuth is US$109 until 25 October, then US$129. One site per license, updates for as long as the theme is maintained, and twelve months of personal support from me. The demo is at azimuth.aftertype.studio, everything else is at aftertype.studio/themes/azimuth.

If you run a newsletter on Ghost and something in Azimuth doesn’t fit how you publish, tell me. That is what the next releases are for.