Blank Magazine is a minimal, editorial-style personal blog theme for Hugo that combines a magazine-cover featured story, a self-hosted photo gallery that auto-scans local images, and print-grade serif typography on a pure-white canvas.
What is Blank Magazine?
Blank Magazine is a static-site blog theme built for Hugo, the Go-based static site generator. It takes Markdown posts and local image files as input and outputs a multi-page website with a home page, article pages, an about page, and photo gallery pages, along with RSS and JSON feeds. The theme works with the standard (non-extended) Hugo binary version 0.120.0 or newer and requires no build step: all styling is in one style.css and all interactivity in one main.js. It is published on GitHub under the MIT License.
Key Features
- Magazine cover story — Set
featured = trueon exactly one post and that post renders as a wide cover-feature block on the home page above the latest posts. - Editorial typography system — Content is styled with Source Serif 4 and Noto Serif SC while the interface uses Inter, creating a serif-for-reading, sans-for-UI split; the fonts are loaded from Google Fonts.
- Self-hosted photo gallery — Drop JPG, JPEG, PNG, WebP, or GIF files into a page-bundle folder next to an
index.md, and the theme scans them, sorts by filename, and uses the first image as the cover automatically. - Gap-free gallery grid — When a gallery has an odd number of photos, the last image spans the full row width instead of leaving an empty cell.
- Taxonomy and navigation — Categories and tags are wired through Hugo's standard taxonomy config, and main navigation is defined with
[[menu.main]]entries. - RSS and JSON output — The home page is configured to emit HTML, RSS, and JSON, supporting feed readers and search tooling.
- Responsive and lightbox — The layout is responsive down to small phones, collapses into a slide-in mobile menu, and includes a lightbox viewer for gallery images.
Who is it for?
- Independent writers and essayists: Publish long-form essays with category and tag front matter, and designate a single post as the featured cover story.
- Photographers and visual storytellers: Assemble photo essays by placing zero-padded image files into
content/galleryfolders, with no third-party image host required. - Developers and self-hosters: Work with a no-build Hugo theme that runs on the standard binary, so generating a site is one
hugocommand. - Bilingual content creators: The bundled Noto Serif SC font and support for
defaultContentLanguage = "zh"make Chinese, English, and mixed editorial sites straightforward.
What can you do with Blank Magazine?
- Launch a personal magazine site: Turn Markdown posts into a cover-story home page with categories (for example essays or tech), tags, RSS, and JSON search output.
- Publish a photography set: Create a page bundle containing only an
index.mddescription plus local images, and the theme generates the gallery grid, lightbox, and automatic cover. - Build a bilingual writing space: Use the included Chinese serif font and language config to publish content in Chinese, English, or both.
How does Blank Magazine work?
The theme is installed by adding it as a Git submodule under themes/blank-magazine and setting theme = "blank-magazine" in the site configuration. Articles are written as Markdown in content/posts with TOML front matter; galleries are page bundles in content/gallery. The repository ships a ready-to-run example site under exampleSite, which you can preview with hugo server --source exampleSite --themesDir ../...
FAQ
Does Blank Magazine require Hugo Extended?
No. Because the theme uses plain CSS and vanilla JavaScript, the standard Hugo binary version 0.120.0 or newer is all you need.
How do I create a photo gallery?
Create a folder under content/gallery containing an index.md plus image files named with zero padding such as 01.jpg; the theme scans the images automatically in filename order and uses the first as the cover.
What image formats are supported in galleries?
The gallery recognizes jpg, jpeg, png, webp, and gif. Images are sorted by filename, and the legacy front-matter photos list still supports external URLs and mixed local/external images.
Is Blank Magazine free to use?
The theme is released under the MIT License, so it is free for personal and commercial use.
