Newspack Themes - Newspack

The Newspack Theme collection consists of one main, or parent, theme, and five child themes.

These themes differ in a few ways — some blocks look different (like Pullquote, Dropcaps, and Separators). The header can behave differently (Newspack Nelson has a striking overlap design). The visual accents can differ (like borders or shapes above/below/beside titles).

Most features, however — such as custom typography, colors and header settings — are available in all six themes.

A demonstration site is available for each theme, and brief descriptions are below, along with links to those sites.

Newspack Theme

Newspack Theme is the main theme, and it is the parent theme for the rest of the collection. It has underlined headers on the Homepage Posts blocks, and a button-like tertiary menu. It uses system fonts for both the headers and the body text.

Newspack Joseph

Newspack Joseph is named after publisher Joseph Pulitzer, best known for the Pulitzer Prizes, which were established with his endowment to Columbia University.

Reminiscent of classic print newspaper styles, this child theme uses Old Standard TT for headers and EB Garamond for the body type, and the whole design is framed by a hairline border.

Newspack Katharine

Newspack Katharine is named after Katharine Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post.

The theme includes a small rectangular accent above the Homepage Posts section titles, dotted borders, and an overlap style on the featured images in the Homepage Posts block.

It uses Barlow for the headers and body typography.

Newspack Nelson

Newspack Nelson is named after Nelson Poynter, who was the owner of the Times Publishing Company, and the namesake of the Poynter Institute.

Its most striking feature is the ‘overlap’ style of the site header. It uses chunky Montserrat for the headers by default, and sans-serif system fonts for the body text.

Other eye catching elements include the Pullquote block, Separator block, and dropcap, which uses the secondary custom color.

Newspack Sacha

Newspack Sacha is named after Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Sacha Pfeiffer.

This theme has centered headers on the Homepage Posts blocks with a border on each side, and centered titles on single posts and pages.

The default header font is IBM Plex Serif, and the default body font is the serif system font; the double serif pair adds an elegant edge to this child theme.

Newspack Scott

Newspack Scott is named after John Scott, namesake of the Scott Trust and owner of the Guardian.

This child theme is blocky, with avatars switching from their default circles to squares, and boxy accents before each Homepage Posts section title, using the current primary color.

Newspack Scott uses Fira Sans Condensed as its default header font, and a serif system font for easy readability on the body.

Switching themes

You can switch between any of the Newspack Themes at any time by navigating to Appearance > Themes, or navigating to Customize and clicking on the Change button next to the Active Theme section at the top of the left column:

Your customizations — such as the logo, menu, widgets, custom colors and typography — will be carried over when switching themes within the Newspack Themes collection. At this time, if you choose to preview the theme switch in the Customizer, it will not preview these existing changes, even though they will be preserved.