#What is Ink Blog Template?

Ink Blog Template is a free, beautifully minimal blogging theme created by the shadcn/ui team for writers, developers, indie hackers, and content creators who want a fast, elegant, and modern blog without the usual bloat of heavy CMS themes. Its core value is delivering a distraction-free reading and writing experience with exceptional performance, perfect typography, and subtle polish — all while giving you full ownership of the code so you can customize or extend it however you like. Built with Next.js 14 App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, MDX for content, and shadcn/ui components, it's ideal for personal blogs, tech tutorials, dev journals, newsletters-in-blog-form, or any content site where speed, clarity, and simplicity matter more than flashy features.

#Features ⚡

• Blazing-Fast Performance: Optimized images (via next/image + Sharp), minimal JS, static generation where possible — consistently 99–100 Lighthouse scores

• MDX Content: Write posts in Markdown/MDX with support for embedded components, code blocks, and custom shortcodes

• Beautiful Typography: Carefully tuned fonts (Inter + Geist Mono), line lengths, spacing, and vertical rhythm for maximum readability

• Dark Mode: Automatic system dark mode + manual toggle with smooth transitions

• Syntax Highlighting: Built-in support for code blocks with multiple themes (via rehype-pretty-code or similar)

• SEO & Metadata: Automatic Open Graph images, Twitter cards, canonical URLs, and structured data

• Responsive Design: Mobile-first layout with perfect readability on phones, tablets, and desktops

• Easy Deployment: One-click deploy to Vercel + pre-configured settings for Netlify or other hosts

#Pros ✅

• Truly minimal yet extremely polished — perfect for writers who want focus on content, not design maintenance

• Outstanding performance — among the fastest blog templates available in the Next.js ecosystem

• Full code ownership — customize, extend, or strip it down however you want

• Free forever — no upsells, no premium locked features

• shadcn/ui foundation makes it easy to add more components or match existing projects

#Cons ⚠️

• Very minimalist — lacks built-in advanced features like comments, search, categories/tags UI, or newsletter signup (easy to add yourself)

• MDX-only content — no built-in CMS (great for developers, less so for non-technical writers)

• No pre-built pagination or archive pages — simple but requires manual addition for large blogs

#Included Components - Templates

• Hero Section: Eye-catching intro with headlines and calls-to-action for blog landing pages.

• Featured Posts: Highlighted articles with images and summaries to draw readers in.

• Categories: Organized navigation for topic-based browsing and discovery.

• Article Grid: Grid layout for displaying multiple posts with previews.

• Blog Detail: Full article view with clean typography for long-form reading.

• Related Posts: Suggestions for similar content to boost engagement.

• CTA (Call-to-Action): Prompts for subscriptions or further actions.

• Footer: Standard site footer with links, copyright, and socials.

#Pricing 💸

• Completely free to download and use, with no subscription or one-time fees.

• No Pro tiers mentioned; all features are included in the free version, though related Shadcn Studio products may offer paid upgrades for other templates.

#Integrations 🧰

• Shadcn UI: Core library for reusable, accessible components.

• Next.js and Astro: Frameworks for building dynamic or static sites.

• Tailwind CSS v4: For utility-first styling and theming.

• TypeScript: For type-safe development.

• Lucide Icons: Lightweight icon set for visual enhancements.

• Figma: Design files for prototyping and collaboration.