Responses by Nick de Jardine, designer and developer, Grafik.

Background: What we put on stage and screen matters. Yet despite the wealth of talent available, roles written for people of color, LGBTQ+ or disabled actors are still too often handed to those without the lived experience to carry them. The result is representation that claims inclusion but lacks authenticity.

It was a pattern playing out globally—one our client began tracking in 2022, as headlines and casting controversies piled up. But it wasn’t just overseas: the same issues were surfacing here in Aotearoa, across briefs, auditions and entire productions. Different projects with the same problem.

Beings is the response—our client’s vision, brought to life through a platform we designed and built from the ground up. The website is a purpose-built tool to explore, discover and cast actors whose lived experience brings depth, nuance and authenticity to roles. Because real stories deserve real voices.

Design core: The casting industry often defaults to what’s familiar, letting authenticity fall by the wayside and flattening stories that deserve depth. Our idea was to flip that script entirely—to create an aspirational, actually cool platform built on lived experience. It makes authentic casting not just easier but so compelling that it becomes the obvious choice. It portrays underrepresented talent in a light that is inspirational, elevating the talent and giving them confidence. The website’s core function is to convince agents that they should put forward an actor with authentic experiences, all the while making it incredibly easy for them to search, assemble a list and save those details. This way, they have no excuses.

The website is typographic, animated and impossible to ignore. The design elevates the talent through progressive layouts set within a fashion-led aesthetic, reframing who belongs on screen.

Favorite details: There’s a hidden game. If you click “Play,” the site transforms into a surreal, pong-style arcade game. Objects fall from the sky—wheelchairs, rainbow flags, prosthetic arms, waving cats, pills and peaches. To rack up points, you bounce them back with a paddle.

It’s designed to surprise, be shared and reframe what belongs on screen—a quiet reclamation that transforms the things we once tried to hide into the things we fight to keep through play.

Technology: The website uses a headless stack: the Prismic CMS with Nuxt, imgix for media and Netlify hosting. We created The Pong Game with Matter.js.