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HalftonePhoto newsmagazine

A photo-led newsmagazine theme: cover plates, cover lines, and desks instead of issues.

v1.1.2since 2026

Halftone's home cover: the red wordmark over a harbour photograph, with cover lines stacked down it.Halftone's home cover: the red wordmark over a harbour photograph, with cover lines stacked down it.
A Halftone photo essay: a black-and-white photograph of Flinders Street, 1927, across the page.
A Halftone report: a black headline and deck over a photograph of high-voltage equipment.
Halftone's Ports desk front: the desk name in red over a photograph of cranes, with cover lines.

Editions

Personal and Team include every release within the major version you buy. Refunds within 14 days, no questions asked.

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. The axis is the desk, not the issue, so the magazine publishes continuously.

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

In the free edition

  • 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

What Pro adds

  • 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

Under the hood

  • Astro and Tailwind CSS v4, static HTML with no client framework, Lighthouse 95+
  • AGENTS.md, a map of the edit points for Claude Code and Cursor