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JR Pugh,An actor-first site, dark and cinematic.
- Client
- JR Pugh, actor, New York
- Year
- 2026
- Made
- Website design and build · Splash and reel · WordPress theme · Business card
- Status
- Live at jeffvhs.com
JR Pugh, NYC-based actor with a grounded, charismatic, and intelligent on-camera presence.
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Project overview
JR Pugh
jeffvhs.com is five pages: Featured, Acting, Reel, About and Contact. Featured opens on the tease cut from the Brazil reel, a thin rail draining beside it as it plays, and moves on to the four headshots; every page is near-black charcoal with film grain and a vignette, and the one light moment is the About page's modeling section.
Built in July 2026 as six static files, then, from August, as the jrpugh WordPress theme, so Jeff swaps the home clip, the reels, the headshots and the résumé himself in the Customizer with a native media picker, the design unchanged.
- 5
- Pages, each its own static file
- 4
- Headshots: one set for the Acting page and the Featured slides
- 2
- Reels on the Reel page
- 1
- Splash, once per browser session
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JR Pugh
Wordmark
The mark, as the final card sets it on its back: the letters of the name scattered on black, J and R in white, P, U, G and H around them in greys. The card Lorenzo sent on 2026-10-23 (Jeff_Business_card.zip, 2.png), shown here on white.
- Charcoal every page#0B0B0C
- Cream the words#F2EDE3
- Oxblood a reel tile#7D1A12
- Olive a reel tile#3A2F16
- Umber a reel tile#241A12
- Midnight a reel tile#141821
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JR Pugh
Colour
Near-black charcoal on every page, with film grain and a vignette over it, and cream for the words (style.css: --cream, the page #0b0b0c). The reel tiles carry a dark page tint each: oxblood, olive, umber or midnight, the palette the site's CLAUDE.md names.
EB Garamond
The words · 400, italic
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789
Inter
Monogram and menu · 400, 600, 700
JR PUGH · Featured Acting Reel About Contact
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JR Pugh
Type
EB Garamond for the words, Inter for the J and R of the monogram and the menu (style.css: --serif 'EB Garamond', --sans 'Inter'; the splash flickers every letter between the two before it settles).
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JR Pugh
The card
The front of the business card: JR Pugh over a hairline, Actor in italic, and the ways to reach him (the phone, the email, www.jeffvhs.com, NYC) in the site's serif on black. The final design, from the file Lorenzo sent on 2026-10-23 (Jeff_Business_card.zip, 1.png), shown on white.
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Design note
The splash, then the site
Before the site, the monogram: J and R resolve at the centre first, then P, U, G and H breathe in around them, every letter flickering between serif and sans until the six settle on the lockup. It plays once per browser session; coming back to Featured skips it. Then the Featured page, the tease from the Brazil reel playing with the rail draining beside it, and the other four pages one after another.
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Design note
Featured
Slide I is the Brazil clip: the phone-call-to-head-smash tease, trimmed with baked fades. The thin rail on the left is a progress line that drains with the clip, the numeral riding its tip; when the clip ends the next slide fades in, and the four headshots follow, letterboxed on every screen so no head is cut off.
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Design note
Acting
Four headshots, unlabelled: no numerals, no names, no calls to action. On a phone each is cropped 3:4 and anchored to the top, so the heads stay whole; on a desktop they are the full image at its natural aspect. Under them the blurb and the résumé.
“Trained for the frame, comfortable in the room, and drawn to work with range, intensity, and emotional specificity.”
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Design note
Reel
The reel page plays the full Brazil clip and the JR Pugh reel as 16:9 tiles that autoplay muted, each with a dark page tint shown while it is in view: oxblood, olive, umber or midnight. The page is one commented list in its script, so a new clip is one more entry.
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Design note
About
Paragraphs, then a black Acting section and the site's one light moment, the modeling section ("Behind the headshots" since the theme's fifth version), as tiles. On a phone the page keeps guaranteed side margins.
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Design note
On a phone
Every page is dark with the frosted menu strip, and the Featured video autoplays on iOS: the attributes a phone needs are set on every film, with a first-touch fallback for Low Power Mode. The responsive pass went down to small phones at 390px.
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Design note
The theme
From its fifth version the site is the jrpugh WordPress theme: the home clip, the reel, the four headshots, the four photos behind them and the résumé are Customizer fields behind a native media picker. Each stores an attachment, not a URL, and falls back to the file the site shipped with if the field is empty or the attachment is deleted, so clearing a field restores the site and can never produce an empty page. With the panel untouched, the markup is byte-identical to the version before.
Live at jeffvhs.com
See it for yourself.
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