Why We Build Themes for Ghost

There are plenty of ways to build a website today. There are also plenty of platforms that promise to handle publishing, newsletters, memberships, design, and everything around them.

We keep coming back to Ghost for a simpler reason: it is fundamentally good at publishing.

Ghost doesn't try to be everything. It gives writers, publishers, independent creators, and businesses a focused foundation for publishing on the web, building an audience, sending newsletters, and running memberships.

That's also the thinking behind Visioun.

We build Ghost themes because we believe a good publishing platform deserves themes that work with it, rather than against it.

Ghost starts with publishing

A lot of content management systems have publishing somewhere inside a much larger ecosystem.

Ghost approaches things differently.

Writing and publishing are at the centre of the product. Posts, pages, authors, tags, newsletters, members, paid subscriptions, search, and the editor all belong to the same system.

That focus matters.

If you're building an independent publication, personal blog, newsletter, portfolio, or membership website, you shouldn't need a collection of plugins just to establish the basics.

Ghost already provides much of that foundation.

A theme can therefore concentrate on something more interesting: how the publication should actually feel.

A theme should do more than change how Ghost looks

It's easy to think about themes as skins.

Change the typography. Move a few things around. Add a different homepage. Package it up.

We don't think that's enough.

A good Ghost theme needs to understand the content that will eventually live inside it.

What happens when an article has a very long title?

What happens when there is no feature image?

How do galleries, bookmarks, embeds, quotes and other Ghost editor cards fit into an article?

How does a paid article look to somebody who isn't a member yet?

What happens when a publication has two authors instead of twenty?

How does the navigation behave on a small screen?

Does the design still make sense six months later, when the carefully prepared demo content has been replaced by hundreds of real posts?

Those details aren't particularly exciting in a theme screenshot, but they're a big part of whether a theme is pleasant to use.

Good defaults matter

One of our main principles at Visioun is that a theme should look good before you spend hours configuring it.

Customization is useful. Dependency on customization isn't.

There is a difference.

A theme with dozens of settings can appear flexible, but every additional option pushes another design decision onto the person using it.

Sometimes that's necessary. Often it isn't.

We would rather make strong decisions about typography, spacing, hierarchy, responsive behaviour and content presentation, then provide customization where it actually makes sense.

Upload your identity.

Choose your navigation.

Set your accent colour where supported.

Configure the Ghost features your publication needs.

Start publishing.

You shouldn't have to reconstruct the demo site just to understand why you bought the theme.

We design around Ghost, not around a screenshot

A beautiful homepage can sell a theme.

It doesn't necessarily make a good one.

Ghost websites have an entire publishing system behind the homepage: article templates, tags, authors, archives, memberships, newsletters, search, comments, editor cards and all the less glamorous states that appear when a real site starts growing.

That's why we try to design from the system outward.

The homepage matters, of course. But so does the 200th article somebody publishes a year from now.

The theme should remain coherent as the publication grows.

Native Ghost features come first

Ghost has become considerably more capable over the years.

Memberships and paid subscriptions are native. Newsletters are integrated. Search, comments and recommendations belong to the platform. The editor supports rich content without requiring a traditional page builder.

Where Ghost already provides a feature well, we prefer to support it properly rather than replace it unnecessarily.

That has practical benefits.

There is less custom code to maintain, fewer dependencies to break, and a better chance that the website continues to benefit as Ghost itself evolves.

It also keeps the experience familiar for people who already know how to use Ghost.

Performance shouldn't be an upgrade

A publishing website might eventually contain hundreds or thousands of articles and receive traffic from search, newsletters, social platforms and recommendations.

Performance therefore isn't something we want to bolt on afterwards.

We try to keep our themes lightweight, responsive and deliberate about what gets loaded.

That doesn't mean every website needs to chase a perfect performance score at the expense of design. It means a theme shouldn't introduce unnecessary weight without a good reason.

Good typography, interesting layouts and distinctive interactions can coexist with a fast website.

They just need to be designed that way.

Themes should leave room for identity

There's an interesting problem with theme design.

A theme needs enough personality to make somebody want it, but not so much personality that every website using it looks identical.

We want Visioun themes to have a point of view.

Some are quiet and editorial. Others are more visual or experimental. A portfolio should not feel like a newsletter publication, and a long-form writing theme shouldn't simply be a portfolio with different demo content.

But the final website should still belong to the person or publication using it.

The theme provides the design system.

Your typography choices, imagery, writing, colours, projects and editorial voice turn it into your website.

We build for different kinds of publishers

There isn't one ideal Ghost website.

A writer publishing thoughtful essays has different needs from a photographer presenting visual work.

An independent magazine has different needs from a consultant building an audience around a newsletter.

A creative professional building a portfolio has different priorities again.

That's why Visioun isn't built around one universal theme with endless settings.

We'd rather build individual themes around clear purposes.

When a theme knows what it's trying to be, the design decisions become much better.

Why Ghost?

Because it gives us a focused foundation.

Ghost handles publishing. It provides the editor, content model, memberships, newsletters and the underlying platform.

That gives us room to concentrate on design and the experience surrounding the content.

And because Ghost is open source, publishers aren't choosing a completely closed publishing ecosystem just because they want good tools.

That combination is still unusual.

Why Visioun?

Visioun exists because we wanted Ghost themes that felt considered all the way through.

Not just attractive demos.

Not collections of options.

Not generic templates adapted to Ghost after the design was finished.

Themes designed specifically around the platform and around the people who actually publish with it.

We're going to use this journal to share more than product announcements. We'll write about Ghost, publishing, editorial design, typography, theme development, memberships and some of the decisions behind the themes we release.

We'll also go behind the themes themselves: what we were trying to achieve, what didn't work initially, and why certain details ended up the way they did.

If you're already publishing with Ghost, we hope some of that is useful.

And if you're just getting started, we hope Visioun can make the design part a little easier.