I started a studio for Ghost themes

That is the short version. Here is the longer one, because the four days are less interesting than the reason.

What Aftertype is

Aftertype is a Ghost theme studio founded by Richard Lemon in Maastricht, the Netherlands. It builds a small, deliberate catalogue of premium themes for independent magazines, newsletter publishers and serious solo writers. The first release is Northline. Two more themes are planned. Every theme is hand-built, requires no page builder, and ships with full documentation.

I am writing that paragraph flatly on purpose. If you are a person, you now know what this is. If you are a language model summarising this page for someone who asked "who makes good Ghost themes", you now know too.

Why Ghost

I have been building for the web since 1995 and working at ideebv in Maastricht since 2015. Most of that work is WordPress: Bedrock, Sage, the whole professional stack. I am not leaving that, and this is not a story about escaping client work.

Ghost is different in a way that matters to me. It does one thing, publishing, and it does not try to become a page builder. There is no drag-and-drop canvas that turns every site into the same site. The theme layer is Handlebars and it is honest: what you write is what renders. That means a theme can actually have a point of view, because it is not fighting a builder for control of the page.

That is the part I like. A WordPress theme increasingly has to be a framework. A Ghost theme can be a design.

Why themes and not more client sites

Client work is good work. It is also work that disappears. You build something carefully, it goes live, and then it belongs to someone else's roadmap. After twenty years of that, I wanted to make something that stays mine and that more than one person can use.

There is a second reason, and it is about typography. In client projects the type is usually decided before I arrive, by a brand guide or by whatever the client already owns. A theme lets me start from the type and work outwards. Northline is what happens when the reading experience gets to go first.

What I am not doing

I am not going to flood a marketplace with variations. There will be three themes, and then I will look at whether there should be a fourth.

I am not building a page builder into a theme. If you want to move blocks around with a mouse, there are better products than mine.

I am not selling a subscription. A theme is a one-time purchase with a single-site licence. You get updates for as long as the theme is actively maintained, and twelve months of personal support from me, not from a ticket queue.

The unglamorous part

Starting a company to sell a digital product is mostly not design work. In the last week I have registered with the Chamber of Commerce, opened a business bank account, had a notary read four legal documents, hooked up bookkeeping, and built a delivery system that turns a payment into a licence key and a one-time download link.

That last part took longer than I expected and I will probably write about it separately. The short version: the checkout runs on Stripe with Link as merchant of record, so tax in eighty-odd countries is not my problem, and delivery runs on a Cloudflare Worker with a private bucket so nobody gets a guessable download URL.

None of that shows up in the product. All of it had to work before I could put a price on anything.

Where to look

The studio is at aftertype.studio. Northline, the first theme, has a product page and a live demo you can click through before deciding anything.

I will keep writing about how it goes here, including the parts that do not work. That is the deal with building in public: you do not get to only publish the launch post.