Kristin Lehman

Kristin has thirty years in film and television, first as a leading actress and now as a director. She holds the distinction of being the first Canadian actress to headline, direct, and actively produce a Canadian network television show for four seasons. When she first came to me, the directing work needed a home of its own, separate from the acting career behind it, and there was nothing online doing that job.

What it had to be was a credibility document. The people who open a director’s site are casting and hiring, they read fast, and they want evidence rather than description. So I planned it, wireframed it and built it: a single page carrying her name and what she does, her directing voice in her own words, the filmography, the reel, and how to reach her, with the header jumping down to sections rather than loading anything new.

That site did the heavy lifting for years. Then the ground underneath it moved. A whole generation of tooling arrived, AI among it, and a site built before any of that existed cannot make use of it, because its design was locked inside settings only one piece of software could read. Nothing was wrong with it. It was built for a moment that had passed.

So I moved it onto a current framework and built her a full set of Design Guidelines, which she had never had in any form: her colour named group by group, her type at real weights on a scale, her spacing, her logo, and the rules that hold it together, published as a live page on her own site rather than a PDF. The design did not change. What changed is that it can now be read, by another person or by any tool pointed at it. And I host the site and look after it, which I have done from the first day it went up.

The work: planning and wireframing. The online experience build. Design Guidelines. The move onto a current framework. Hosting and care, ongoing.

Plan. The first questions were about the reader, not the layout. Who opens a director’s site, how fast do they read, and what do they need to have seen before they leave. That settled the shape: a single page carrying everything, with About, Work and Contact in the header jumping down to sections rather than loading anything new, so nobody waits on a page or loses their place.

Wireframe. What belonged on the page and in what order, settled before any of it went into production. Her name and what she does, then the directing voice in her own words, then the filmography, then the episodes someone can go and watch, then how to reach her. Each section short enough that scrolling never feels like work, with the reel and the stills lightbox doing the arguing that copy cannot.

Build. Launched, and it ran without drama for years while Kristin’s directing credits kept accumulating behind it.

Move it onto a current framework. The design was proven, so I read it off the existing site rather than reopen decisions that were working. Forty-one values came across exactly, down to the warm tan that doubles as the header bar and the single rust carrying every link. What the site is made of now is plain files, each with a name, in a repository that belongs to Kristin. Anything can read them.

Design Guidelines. The logo as one downloadable file at one size. Colour in six named groups. Poppins in four real weights with a type scale. A three-step spacing system. The component rules, down to why nav links are text rather than buttons. Every swatch renders from the site’s own values and every contrast figure is measured as the page loads, so the guidelines cannot claim something the site does not do. That is also what lets the design travel now, to a poster, a title card, a one-sheet, or whatever tool gets pointed at it, because named values are what current tooling needs in order to produce Kristin rather than an approximation of her.

Check nothing moved. The point of a recreation is that nobody can tell. Every stylesheet, script, font and image was compared against the site it replaced and came back identical.

Keep going. Kristin hosts with me, so the person who planned and built the site is the person looking after it. Not a support queue. Not a plan tier. Every update gets tested on staging before it touches the live site, and the site gets watched rather than waited on.