Design on Northlight

Measuring Contrast Instead of Guessing

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The design reference for this theme carried contrast ratios for every accent colour, worked out by hand from the sRGB values. When they were finally measured against the surfaces they actually sit on, several were wrong — and the ones that were wrong were the ones nobody would have questioned.

Thumb and background hero

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This post exists to render heroStyle = "thumbAndBackground". Every other post on this site uses the default, basic.

Its cover has no text in it, and that is the point. The covers elsewhere on this site have their title baked into the artwork, which is the right choice for a card but the wrong one here: an overlay treatment would then show the title twice. Artwork for these styles should carry no words.

Background hero

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This post exists to render heroStyle = "background". Every other post on this site uses the default, basic.

Why This Theme Has No Shortcodes

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The theme Northlight replaces ships about forty-five shortcodes. An audit of every post on the site using it found that exactly zero appeared in any of them.

Unused surface is not free#

Every shortcode is a template to maintain, a name to document, and a behaviour someone will eventually depend on. Shipping forty-five of them to cover the handful a given site might want is a trade that only looks good before the maintenance starts.

Two Modes, Not One Inverted

hello@example.com (Morten Victor Nordbye) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Inverting a palette is the cheapest way to get a dark mode and the easiest one to spot. Pure white text on pure black vibrates; mid greys that read as calm on white read as murky on black; and a saturated accent that was comfortable at 6:1 becomes a glare at 15:1.