Frieze band

Five portrait frames in a core/columns row, butted edge to edge with no gutter between them, running the entire width of the page. Above the run, a constrained intro carries a tracked caps label and one short line inside the ordinary clamp gutters; below it, a single centred 13px tracked caption sits on the band's own ground. Nothing else is in the section: the band is the whole idea.

Every other gallery in the library separates its frames. This one refuses to. The core/columns carries "blockGap":"0", so the five columns touch, and the run sits in its own align: full group with zero padding rather than in the constrained inner, so the first frame starts at the left edge of the viewport and the fifth ends at the right. The five photographs stop reading as five cards and start reading as one horizontal object spanning the page, and the only white in the section is the strip above the band and the strip below it.

It survives colourlessness because the device is the absence of a gap. There is no rule, no wash and no border doing the work: what makes the band read as one object is that nothing separates its parts, and a theme cannot recolour nothing. Whatever the buyer's base and contrast resolve to, the band still runs edge to edge and the seams still vanish.

At 390px core stacks the columns and the gutterless seam turns through ninety degrees: the blockGap of 0 applies to the row axis as well, so the five frames sit directly on top of one another with no gap and no shadow between them, a vertical butt-join instead of a horizontal one. The strip is still one continuous object, now portrait rather than landscape, and still bleeds to both edges because the run's group keeps its zero padding at every width. The intro and the caption keep their clamp gutters, so the two constrained things stay inset and the one full-bleed thing stays full-bleed, which is the same reading the desktop gives.

• Ink frieze: the ground inverts. The band's ground becomes a contrast chain and all three lines of type a base chain, so the intro and the caption sit on ink and the five photographs read as hung against a dark wall. The frieze itself is identical to the base: same five frames, same crop, same zero gutter. One axis moves, and it is the colour relationship, which is the only colour move that arrives in every theme: base and contrast are the two universal slugs, and inversion between them is visible wherever a theme has a palette at all.

Inherits: every colour (the band's ground is a base chain, all three lines of type a contrast chain, and the variation swaps the pair), the typeface, and the spacing scale (spacing|70 above and below the section, spacing|50 between the intro and the band, spacing|30 between the band and its caption, spacing|20 between the label and the line).

Decides: the frame count and the crop (five images at aspectRatio: "4/5" with "scale":"cover", so whatever the buyer uploads is cropped to the same portrait proportion and the run stays a single unbroken rectangle), the zero gutter, the 1240px measure for the intro and the caption, the clamp gutters clamp(1.25rem, 4vw, 4rem) that the run itself does not get, and the proportion of the type: a 13px tracked caps label, a 15px to 17px line at 1.5, and a fixed 13px tracked caps caption, which is an incidental label rather than copy and is kept under thirty characters for that reason.

The structure is what makes the bleed work. The outer group is align: full with a constrained inner at 1240px and no side padding of its own; the intro and the caption are ordinary constrained children that carry the clamp gutters as their own padding; the run is a second align: full group with padding: 0 on all four sides and a default layout, so its core/columns child fills it completely. Putting the columns in the constrained inner instead, or leaving the gutters on the outer group, would inset the band by the gutter and the frieze would become a wide row of pictures like any other.

The photographs. All five image blocks include example photographs; choose Replace to select an image from your media library, and the 4:5 crop and the object-fit: cover are already set, so nothing has to be resized to make the band line up. Pick images that share a light level rather than five unrelated subjects; with no gutter, a run of five is read as one picture, and one frame much lighter than its neighbours reads as a hole in the band rather than as a different photograph.

The copy is the second thing. The label reads best under thirty characters in caps, the line under about seventy, and the caption is a tag on the band rather than a sentence: keep it short, because it is set at 13px and anything longer wants to be body copy at a readable size instead.

Adding or removing a frame is the third. The columns block distributes its children evenly, so six or four frames need no other change; below four the frames grow tall enough that the band stops reading as a strip.

The copied markup includes WordPress Photo Directory example photographs. The public image URLs keep the examples visible after pasting. Select an image or cover and choose Replace to use your own Media Library files. See image credits for the sources and licenses. Pasting an image URL does not import a Media Library attachment.