Hero column portrait

The cover ships EMPTY, which is valid at WordPress 6.6 and 7.0: the buyer clicks it and picks a photograph, and build:previews substitutes one of ours at render time. There is no url, no src and no background-image anywhere in the pattern.

The veil is a contrast chain at dimRatio 20, which is decoration and nothing else: no word in this pattern sits on the photograph. The one line that reads as a caption is on an opaque plate whose ground is a base chain and whose type is a contrast chain, so the contrast walk finds the plate first and measures an ordinary guaranteed pair rather than type over an image whose luminance nobody can know. That is the only legible way to put a line on a picture at a veil this light.

The plate lives INSIDE the cover's inner container, because a cover clips its overflow and forms no stacking context: anything pulled up from outside would paint under the photograph, invisibly. It is pushed to the foot by a vertical flex group with verticalAlignment: bottom and its own min-height: 38rem, not by a custom contentPosition, which would shrink-wrap the inner container and make the plate's width depend on the length of its words.

The cover's height is 38rem, never a vh value: the preview on this page sizes its frame to the pattern, and a viewport-relative height would size the pattern to the frame in turn.

The cover also states its own style.color.text as a base chain, so core's :where(.wp-block-cover:not(.has-text-color)) rule, which would otherwise paint anything in it a literal #fff, never fires.

Core stacks the columns. In the base the type column is first in the markup, so a phone reads the eyebrow, the headline, the lede and the buttons, and then meets the picture: the reading order the desktop composition already had. portrait-mirror puts the picture first in the markup, so on a phone the picture comes first; that is the trade the mirror makes and it is stated on the product page.

cover-plate and the other full-bleed covers ship a short row of page copy below them so a buyer can see where the section ends. This cover is inside the 1240px measure with the band's own paper around it on all four sides, so the section already reads as a section and the extra row would be scenery.

The photograph, then the headline. The eyebrow and the plate's caption are both set in caps with wide tracking and read best under about 28 characters; past that they wrap and the plate grows a second line.

• Portrait left (portrait-mirror): the composition mirrors. The cover takes the left column at 44%, the type the right at 48%. Nothing else moves, so it is a composition variation and not a colour one.
• Night portrait (night-portrait): the colour axis, by inversion. The band becomes contrast with base type, both buttons swap, and the foot plate inverts with the band, so it stays ink on the picture rather than becoming a white chip on a dark section. Inversion between base and contrast is the only colour move that arrives in every theme; every other slug's luminance is unknowable. The veil is unchanged, because it is still a contrast chain over the photograph in both.