A New Design for Actors Who Want Something Understated
Modernist is a new template in the catalog. It is the most restrained design we have made and it is not for everybody, which is the point of having more than one.
What it is
Generous white space. One typeface, used at three sizes. A full-width headshot or reel at the top and then nothing between the visitor and the content. No boxes, no shadows, no icons, no dividers, no animation on scroll.
The design decisions are mostly subtractions. What remains is your photograph, your name, your work, and a lot of air.
Who it suits
Actors with strong photography. That is the honest qualifier. A minimal design puts everything on the quality of the images because there is nothing else on the page to look at, and a mediocre headshot on Modernist is more exposed than the same headshot on a busier template.
It also suits people with a small amount of material. Six credits look deliberate here and sparse elsewhere, because the layout is not waiting to be filled.
Who it does not suit
Actors with a lot going on. If you have four galleries, a shop, a blog and a teaching page, a design with no visual hierarchy beyond type size will make all of it feel equally important, which means none of it does. Pick something with more structure.
Voice actors should look at VoiceNow instead, which is built around a player.
The technical side
It is the lightest design we ship. No slider library, no icon font, one web font, and images handled through the pipeline described in faster images. It loads faster than anything else in the catalog by a comfortable margin, and speed is a real advantage as covered in SEO for actor websites.
Personalizing it without wrecking it
Modernist has one accent color and it is used sparingly. Resist the urge to add a second. If you want to change something, change the typeface using font choices or try grayscale mode, which suits it particularly well.
The signature layouts share its design language, described in the final two Modernist signature layouts.
Create a free actor website and try it against your own photographs.
