This site is a preview of a typographic theme for Ghost. It is set up like a small literary publication, with essays, notes and a short series, so that you can see how the theme handles real reading rather than placeholder text.
How Ghost themes work
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform for blogs, newsletters and paid memberships. It keeps two things separate: your content and its design. Posts, pages, tags, authors and members all live in Ghost itself. A theme only decides how that content is displayed.
A theme is a small bundle of templates, styles and scripts. The templates are written in Handlebars, a simple templating language, and describe the home page, a post, a page, a tag archive and an author archive. Ghost fills them with your content when someone visits.
Because the two are separate, you can switch themes at any time without touching your writing. You upload a theme as a zip file under Settings, Design, and it takes over the whole site at once. Switch back and nothing is lost.
Themes can also offer their own settings, which appear in the same Design panel. This one lets you choose:
- The typeface: Literata, bundled with the theme, or Times New Roman.
- The colour scheme: light, dark, or following the reader’s system.
- Justified and hyphenated text like a book, or ragged right.
- Indented paragraphs like a book, or a blank line between them.
What this preview shows
The posts here are written to exercise every part of the theme. You will find long essays with headings and quotations, short notes without pictures, a three-part series, a list of books with link cards, picture galleries, a code sample and a post for subscribers only. Pages like this one and the colophon use the simpler page layout.
Seeing it in dark mode
This preview follows your device’s colour setting, so the easiest way to see the dark version is to switch your device to dark mode and come back. You’ll find the setting here:
| Mac | System Settings › Appearance › Dark |
|---|---|
| iPhone and iPad | Settings › Display & Brightness › Dark |
| Windows | Settings › Personalisation › Colours › Dark |
| Android | Settings › Display › Dark theme |
To try it without changing your device, open this page in Chrome or Edge, open the developer tools, and in the Rendering panel set “Emulate CSS media feature prefers-color-scheme” to dark. On your own site, the theme settings can also fix it to light or dark for every reader.
About the pictures
All the pictures are in the public domain: prints, woodcuts, photographs and book illustrations from the fifteenth century to the early twentieth. They were found through the Public Domain Image Archive, a project of The Public Domain Review. Full credits are on the colophon.