Hero slab over still

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 ships EMPTY and is valid at 6.6 and 7.0, so pick one in 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.

• 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.

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.