Actor website design, decision by decision

Nobody has ever been cast because of a website's design, and people are passed over every week because of one. That asymmetry is the whole brief. Design cannot win you the room, so the only thing it can do for you is stay out of the way of the three pieces of evidence that can: the headshot, the reel and the credits.

Which makes this a short list of decisions with real answers, rather than a matter of taste.

1. The first screen: a photograph, a name, one way in

A current headshot, your name, and a single clear route to the reel. No splash screen, no logo of your initials, no line of italic text about storytelling, no slideshow that moves on its own.

The visitor already knows they are on an actor's website. The question they have is whether you look like the person they are casting, and a photograph answers it in under a second. A carousel answers it in four, because it also asks them to wait.

If the first screen is working, somebody who opens the site and shuts it immediately still leaves with your face and your name. That is a good outcome, not a failure.

2. Photos: one crop, one treatment, eight at most

The single decision that separates a page that looks professional from one that does not is consistency of crop. Head and shoulders at the same distance in every frame. A gallery at six different zoom levels reads as careless even to someone who could not say why.

Three practical rules behind it:

1. Pick one treatment and hold it. All full color or all black and white, one aspect ratio, one set of edges. Mixing them halves the effect of the good ones.
2. Eight is plenty. Three to six is usually better. Past that a gallery stops being evidence and starts being a mood board.
3. Full width is not automatically better. A headshot bled across a desktop screen is cropped by the browser, not by the photographer, and the crop lands differently on every window size. Contained, with space around it, is safer and usually looks more expensive.

3. Type: one typeface, two sizes

One family for everything, at two sizes: one for headings and one for text. That is enough, and it is what most designs that look deliberate are actually doing.

Set body text at 17 or 18 pixels and leave it there. Credits are read quickly by people who read hundreds of them, and small type is the fastest way to be skimmed instead of read. If a design offers a display face for your name alone, one word is exactly the right amount of it to use.

The one thing to check rather than trust: a typeface has to survive your longest credit title and your longest role name without wrapping into a shape that breaks the row.

4. Color: the headshot picks it

Your photographs are the brightest thing on the page, so they set the palette whether you plan it or not. Choose a background that lets them sit still, then one accent color for links and buttons, and stop.

On dark against light, there is no rule, only a consequence. Dark backgrounds make a lit headshot carry the whole screen, which is why so many reels pages use them. They also make long text harder to read and a resume harder to print. A reasonable answer is a dark section behind the reel and a light one behind the credits, which is how several of the designs here are built.

5. Navigation: five to seven items, named plainly

Home, Photos, Reel, Resume, Contact. Add Press or Projects if you have either. That is the whole menu, and each item is named after the thing it contains.

Two failures to avoid. A menu of two items hides the evidence behind a click: if somebody has to guess where the reel lives, some of them will not. A menu of eleven items is a filing cabinet, and a page called "More" is where things go to be forgotten.

Never make the resume the last item nobody reaches. It is the page that gets printed and handed to somebody else, which makes it the most likely thing on your site to leave the building.

6. Design the phone first, because that is where it opens

Your site will be opened on a phone, often by somebody walking between rooms. That is the real design target, and the desktop version is the easier problem.

What to check on a real phone, in your hand, not in a narrow browser window:

1. The headshot fills the screen without pinching, and your name is readable without zooming.
2. The reel fills the width and does not start playing by itself.
3. The credits table does not scroll sideways. A table that needs a horizontal swipe will not be read.
4. Every tappable thing is big enough to hit at a walking pace.

7. Do you need a designer

No, and the more useful question is what happens when you change your mind.

A designed site is a decision you make once and then live with, because the content and the design are the same files. Changing the look later means paying for it again, and in the meantime adding a credit is somebody else's job rather than yours. That is how sites go stale: not through neglect but through friction.

Here, the design is a setting. There are 81 active designs, all of them drawing the same account, so switching costs nothing and loses nothing: your photographs, credits, reel and resume are stored once and simply drawn differently. You can change it on a Tuesday because you are bored of it, and your credits are still where you left them.

That is also the honest limit of this page. The design decisions above are worth understanding because they tell you what to look for. They are not worth a rebuild, and you should not have to earn the right to change your mind about them.