Meet ArtistPass: an open-source portfolio template for actors and artists

#webdev #opensource #buildinpublic #showdev

Hello DEV 👋

I have just released ArtistPass v0.1.0, a small open-source portfolio website for actors, performers and other artists.

The idea started with a very ordinary problem: an artist's professional material often lives in six different places.

Headshots in a Drive folder
Reels on YouTube or Vimeo
A resume attached to an old email
Recent work on Instagram
A casting card saved somewhere else
Contact details copied into every new message

ArtistPass turns that collection into one designed, shareable website.

It is not a casting marketplace, a social network or a promise of auditions. It is simply a focused presentation and publishing tool that an artist can own.

What is in v0.1.0?

The current actor-focused template includes:

a cinematic landing page;
showreel and role-specific clips;
headshots and a gallery;
role-fit and casting information;
resume and casting-card downloads;
contact and sharing flows;
a browser Admin for routine updates;
Vercel Blob publishing for shared text, images and PDFs;
a read-only fictional public demo.

The demo uses a fictional artist, so the full experience can remain public without borrowing a real person's identity or private material.

The interesting constraint was not the homepage

The visual design was the enjoyable part. The harder question was:

How can a non-technical owner update a polished static site without turning it into another large CMS?

The current architecture is deliberately small:

index.html
  -> loads /api/config
  -> renders the public portfolio and browser Admin

Admin Publish
  -> checks a server-side password
  -> writes artist-config.js to Vercel Blob
  -> the live site reads the new config on refresh

There is no database and no user-account system. Each deployment has its own private Admin publishing password. Images and PDFs can upload to Blob. Videos stay on services that already know how to host and stream video, so the artist pastes a link instead of asking this project to become a transcoding platform.

GitHub publishing is still available as a fallback for older installations, but Blob is now the simpler default.

What I deliberately did not build

Small projects become confusing surprisingly quickly when every possible feature is treated as a requirement.

ArtistPass does not currently include:

multi-user roles and team permissions;
subscriptions or billing;
private video hosting or DRM;
a general drag-and-drop page builder;
dozens of themes generated on demand;
claims about bookings, casting decisions or career outcomes.

The lightweight Admin password is suitable for this small, owner-operated template. It would not be the right authentication model for a multi-tenant SaaS product, and the documentation says that plainly.

Two honest ways to use it

The release has two different entry points.

For developers and website makers: clone the MIT-licensed template, deploy it with Vercel, connect Blob storage and adapt it for an artist or client.

For non-technical artists: use an assisted setup path. Someone technical handles GitHub, Vercel, the initial content and possibly the domain. After handoff, the artist uses the browser Admin for ordinary changes.

I renamed the self-serve action to Developer because the underlying Vercel flow still includes Git-provider choices, permissions and infrastructure setup. Calling that effortless onboarding for every artist would be misleading.

Why release it as open source?

Open source makes this experiment more useful even if it never becomes a large product.

Developers can inspect exactly what the Admin sends and where content is stored. Freelancers and small studios can start from a working artist-specific base. Artists are not locked into a proprietary editor simply because someone helped them set up the first version.

It also gives the next decisions a better test. Before building a Lovable-style visual builder or ten category-specific themes, I would rather see whether developers fork the base, artists ask for setup, or contributors identify the parts worth extending.

You are welcome to explore it

If you build static publishing tools, Vercel projects, portfolio templates or software for creative professionals, I would genuinely value your feedback.

Useful contribution areas include: