Hero slab over still

A hero built from two full-bleed slabs and nothing else: an inverted band of your theme's contrast colour carrying an eyebrow, an h1 and two buttons, and directly beneath it a core/cover that holds a photograph and no words. They are siblings, they meet on one hard edge, and that edge is the design.

Two full-bleed slabs meeting on a single hard seam, with type and picture never mixed: the ink slab asserts, the picture answers, and the line between them is the only ornament in the pattern. The block gap between the two is exactly 0 and the cover states margin: 0 top and bottom, so the seam is a drawn line rather than a gap the theme's spacing scale happened to leave.

• Slate and mint: a slate slab with an Arial Black headline, a mint eyebrow and primary action, and a pale hand-off row below the still.
• Paper slab: the band inverts to base ground with contrast type and the buttons swap with it. The seam still reads, because what meets the picture is a flat field of colour either way.
• In motion: backgroundType: "video" on the cover and nothing else changed; core writes autoplay muted loop playsinline. Since no type sits on the clip, the motion costs no legibility.

Inherits: every colour (the slab's contrast ground and base type, the veil, the paper under the hand-off row), the typeface, the spacing scale. Decides: the seam, the 32rem measure the headline is broken over, the type ramp from a 13px eyebrow at 0.26em tracking to a headline running 44px to 88px at -0.035em and 0.96 line-height, the band's generous vertical padding, and the cover's 26rem minimum height in rem, never vh. The heading states its own colour chain, because a theme's heading element style beats an inherited group colour. The cover states its own text colour chain too, so core's :where() rule that paints cover text #fff never applies to anything a buyer adds later.

A photograph's luminance is unknowable, which is why the rest of the catalogue either veils it heavily (cover-veil) or puts the type on a plate (cover-plate). This hero takes the third route: it puts no type on the photograph at all. The cover's inner container is empty, so there is nothing in this pattern whose contrast depends on the image the buyer uploads. Every word sits on a flat contrast or base field, measured as an ordinary pair.

That is the reason to choose this over a veil hero. A veil hero is a promise that a heavy overlay bounds the ground; this one has no ground to bound. The buyer can drop in a blown-out sky or a night shot and the headline is exactly as readable as it was.

The veil that IS on the cover is a light one, dimRatio 20 of the same contrast chain the slab above is painted in. It carries no legibility argument; it is there so the picture sits in the same tonal family as the band and the seam reads as one construction rather than two pasted things.

Both slabs are alignfull children of one flow-layout wrapper with blockGap: 0 and zero padding. The hard edge comes from that and from the cover's own zero margins, never from a negative margin, for two measured reasons. A negative margin on a first child collapses into its parent, so pulling the cover up would move the wrapper instead. And a cover forms no stacking context while clipping its overflow, so a sibling pulled up AFTER a cover paints under the photograph, invisibly.

The cover's own padding is 0 on all four sides, because core ships .wp-block-cover { padding: 1em } and the cover holds nothing that needs insetting.

The photograph: the cover includes an example image; choose Replace to pick one from the media library. Then the headline, which wants three or four words at this size; the 32rem measure is what makes it break into a block of two or three lines rather than running across the band. Then the two button labels.

A hero of two full-bleed slabs fills the preview on this page edge to edge, and on a buyer's page it is never the whole page either. So the pattern ships with what comes next: a short row on your theme's paper under the picture, a tracked label and one paragraph at a 34rem measure. It shows where the hero ENDS, it is ordinary page copy, and it is the first thing a buyer rewrites or deletes.

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.