Head MakerA stranger hands over their face in about forty seconds.
- Role
- Designer & builder
- Team
- Solo
- Built with
- Canvas, vanilla JavaScript
- Output
- A playable head, or a transparent PNG
- Year
- 2026
Head Maker turns a photograph into a character: cut out the head, place the eyes, and it comes alive and joins the games on this site. The whole thing happens inside the browser tab, and the photo never leaves the device.
This is the one screen that asks for something people are careful with.
A face is not a file. Everything else here can be browsed with no commitment, and this page opens by asking a visitor for a photograph of themselves. Every decision on it shortens the distance between arriving and seeing something recognisably you, and puts the privacy promise in the interface rather than in a policy.
Four steps, named for what you get rather than what you do.
Photo, Cutout, Face, Alive. Not Upload, Crop, Configure, Export. Each label is the thing you have at the end of it, so the row reads as a story with an ending instead of a form with four pages. The buttons agree: Cut it out, then Bring it to life.
The landmarks are placed for you, and you nudge them.
A blank canvas is a request for work. Eyes, brows, nose and mouth arrive already positioned, and the instruction is to drag one if it looks wrong. Almost nobody moves more than a single dot, which is the point: the step exists so the result is yours, not so you have to earn it.
Half of every head I baked was the wall behind me.
The cut used to be an oval, and a real head is narrower than an oval everywhere below the cheekbones. The room came with the face, and on the dark Play page that read as a bright band tracing the silhouette. It lifts a real background matte first now, then unmixes the edge, so a hair thinner than a pixel takes part of the alpha instead of a white ghost of itself.
It refuses rather than guesses.
The first version that worked on the numbers gave me back a bald head with a face on it. It had decided hair was background, because hair is the most uniform thing at the top of a portrait, and every number improved while it did that. A region has to own two corners of the frame now, and anything unresolved comes back as the plain oval rather than a confident wrong answer.
The reward is not a download.
The head walks off this page and into the games. It gets a face rig, blinks, eye tracking, physics and a contact shadow, because unlike almost anything else on this site it is standing on something. The transparent PNG is there too, but what people come back for is watching their own face lose a football match.
It stopped being an article and became a tool.
The first version explained itself. It had prose, a heading and a scroll, which is what you build when you are not sure anyone will follow. It is one screen now, picture on the left and decision on the right. Every sentence left on it is either an instruction or the promise about the photograph.
