A comp card is a model's calling card: one photograph on the front, four more and your measurements on the back. It is left behind after a casting, so everything on it has to be legible at arm's length and true on the day.
What goes on one
The front is one photograph and your name. Nothing else earns the space. It should look like you look now, not at your best angle on your best day, because the whole document is a promise that the person who walks in matches it.
The back is four photographs and your measurements. Four is the number that fits at a readable size, and they should show range rather than four versions of the same look: a full length, a close one, something commercial and something with a different energy.
The measurements a card carries are height, bust or chest, waist, hips, dress size, shoe size, hair and eyes. Write them the way your market writes them. Leave out anything you are not sure of rather than guessing, because a number that is wrong is found out at the fitting.
The size
5.5 by 8.5 inches, which is half a sheet of US letter, at 300dpi. That is what a printer will ask for and it is what this page produces. Anything smaller reads as an amateur print, and a card that is a different shape from every other card in the pile gets handled differently, which is not an advantage.
What a comp card template actually is
A model comp card template is a 5.5 by 8.5 inch layout with one photograph and your name on the front, and four photographs plus your measurements on the back. That is the whole specification. The reason templates exist is not decoration: it is that an agency receiving fifty cards needs the name in the same place on all fifty, and a card that puts it somewhere interesting is the card nobody can file.
So a template is worth using for the parts that are fixed, and worth ignoring for the rest. The fixed parts are the trim size, the name on the front, four images on the back, and the measurements in a readable block. Anything a template adds beyond that, borders, gradients, a script typeface, is working against the one job the card has.
The generator on this page is a template in that sense. It draws both sides at the trim size a printer asks for, puts your name and photographs where an agency expects to find them, and leaves out every field you have not filled in.
Do actors use comp cards?
Some do, and it depends entirely on whether you do commercial print and modeling work alongside acting. If you audition for film, television and theater, a comp card is the wrong document: nobody in that room wants your hip measurement, and the thing they do want, your credits, will not fit on a card.
If you also work commercially, on catalogs, campaigns, lifestyle shoots, then an actor comp card is a normal thing to carry and it is the same 5.5 by 8.5 card a model uses. The difference is which photographs go on the back: for commercial print, pick four looks a client can cast from rather than four dramatic ones.
For acting alone, the two documents that do the work are a headshot with a resume stapled to the back, and an actor business card that points at your website.
Digital comp cards
A digital comp card is the same card sent as a link or a PDF instead of a print, and it is now how most of them actually travel. Casting goes out by email and submissions go through portals, so the card that gets looked at is usually the one on a screen.
Two things change when it is digital. It has to be legible on a phone, which means the measurements cannot be set in six point type. And it dates, because a link that still shows last year's photographs is worse than no link at all. That is the argument for a card drawn from your account rather than exported once: change the photographs on your profile and the card is redrawn from them.
Both sides download as images here, which is what a printer and an email both take. If you would rather send one address than two files, your website already is the digital version, with the photographs at full size and the measurements underneath.
Making yours here
The generator builds the card from the photographs and details already on your account, so sign in and come back to this page.