Northline: notes on the first theme

Northline is a magazine theme for Ghost. Editorial layouts, a strong front page, and typography that does the work instead of decoration doing it. It is the first theme from Aftertype and it is live now.

Here is why it exists.

Most Ghost themes are blog themes. A stream of posts, newest first, maybe a featured card at the top. That works for a personal site. It does not work for a publication that has sections, an editorial voice and more than one thing going on at once. I wanted a theme that felt like a magazine you would actually pick up, and that still ran on plain Ghost without a plugin or a build step for the person using it.

So the front page is built in sections, not as a feed. There is a current edition block for the lead story, a briefing section for latest posts, and topic rows that map to tags you choose in the theme settings. Editors' picks can be switched on once there is enough featured work to fill it. All of this is configured from Ghost's design settings, no code.

Things I decided not to build. No carousel, no slider, nothing that moves on its own. Editorial sites should feel like print with a good stylesheet. No page builder. Ghost's editor is good and the theme should get out of its way. No extra JavaScript for things Ghost already handles: the subscribe forms use Portal, search uses Ghost's own search, comments are Ghost's native comments.

Things I spent too long on. The featured post block, which is a big image, a tight headline and a byline, and that is it. It took many rounds to get the proportions right at every width. And the fonts: Northline ships with its own type choices and loads them locally, because the fastest theme is the one that does not load five weights to use two.

What is next for Northline is mostly listening. It is a 1.0. Real publications will find the edges. This journal runs on it, so I will find some of them myself.

Northline is available at aftertype.studio. If you run it and something is off, tell me. That is what the 1.0.x releases are for.