Aperture is for photographers and visual artists who want their site to feel like a gallery wall, not a marketing landing page. Its signature idea is a semantic dual canvas: personal work is shown on white, commissioned work on black, so the background itself tells the viewer something. The work index is a quiet list of project titles — hover one and its photograph follows your cursor. Series pages run as numbered sequences (01 / 08). A persistent light/dark toggle lets every visitor choose. No masonry grid, no price cards, no testimonials carousel — the photographs do the talking.
Built on Astro 6 + Tailwind v4 with TypeScript. Identity, hero, selected frames, credits, contact, and social all read from a single config file — branding the site is a one-file edit, no component changes needed.
Who it's for
- Portrait, landscape, and editorial photographers
- Commercial photographers and studios
- Visual artists and image-led creatives
- Studios shooting commissioned + personal work
- Anyone who wants a portfolio that looks fine-art, not template
What's distinctive
- Semantic dual canvas — set a series to `mode: "personal"` (renders on white) or `mode: "commissioned"` (renders on black); the page, nav, and type all flip to match
- Cursor-follow work index — the Work list is plain text; hovering a project title reveals its cover image trailing the cursor (falls back to inline thumbnails on touch)
- Numbered series sequencing — each project runs as 01 / NN full-width frames with prev/next, on the canvas its mode dictates
- Light / dark toggle — sun/moon in the nav, preference persists in localStorage, pre-paint script prevents FOUC
- Keyboard-navigable lightbox (←/→/Esc) behind every gallery image
- "Selected clients & press" credits instead of a testimonials carousel — the premium-tier convention
- Subtle film-grain overlay and an editorial Fraunces + Mona Sans type system
What's included
- Full source: Astro 6 + Tailwind v4 + TypeScript
- Home, Work index, per-series detail pages, About, Journal index + post, Contact, All-Sections gallery, Privacy, Terms, 404
- 14 reusable sections you can rearrange
- One-file config at src/config/site.ts (no code changes needed for branding)
- Two Astro Content Collections: series (with a mode field for the white/black system) + journal
- Contact form (Formspree / FormSubmit / Netlify)
- Production-ready deploy configs for Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages
- Demo imagery is hand-picked and swap-ready — replace every image with your own work
- Lifetime updates for this theme
- Documentation at aerolaunch.app/docs/themes/aperture
