Built By
Max Goldberg is a web developer based in Portland, Oregon who builds portfolio sites for musicians, composers, and creative professionals. He has a background in performance marketing and SEO, which informs every build — sites are designed not just to look right, but to load fast and show up in search results when someone Googles the artist's name.
About This Site
tobykarlin.com was built to serve as Toby's digital home — a place where directors, choreographers, and producers can hear his work, see his credits, and reach out about a project. The design needed to feel cinematic without competing with the music itself.
The visual language uses a near-black background with teal accents and warm off-white text, paired with DM Serif Display for headings and Inter for body copy. The palette was chosen to evoke a darkened theater or mixing studio — the kind of space where you focus on what you're hearing, not what you're looking at.
The portfolio section showcases six featured works across film, dance, and live performance, with video embeds from YouTube and Vimeo. To keep the page fast despite all the media, the site uses lightweight embed libraries (lite-youtube-embed and lite-vimeo-embed) that load a static thumbnail first and only initialize the full video player when clicked. This approach eliminates hundreds of kilobytes of iframe overhead on initial page load.
The gallery strip presents eight instrument and performance photos in a horizontal scroll, all served in WebP with JPEG fallbacks and responsive srcset attributes. A custom Python script generates optimized variants at multiple widths for every source image in the project.
Three Spotify album embeds and a Bandcamp player give visitors multiple ways to listen without leaving the page. Structured data markup identifies Toby as a Person with composer and performer roles, linking to his IMDb credits, Spotify artist page, and social profiles so search engines can build a complete knowledge panel.
The site ships as pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no build step, no framework, and no CMS. It includes a skip-to-content link, keyboard-navigable mobile menu, ARIA labels on all interactive elements, and a live region that announces portfolio filter changes to screen readers.
Other Projects
CaseValue.law
In addition to musician portfolios, Max builds web tools for other industries. One example is a free California case value calculator built for people in the state dealing with personal injury claims. The tool asks a series of questions about the injury, medical treatment, and time missed from work, then produces an estimated case value range drawn from published settlement data and California-specific benchmarks.
The calculator is a React application designed to be approachable for people with no legal background — a guided, step-by-step interface that turns a complicated question into a clear answer. It also includes a Sanity-powered blog targeting search queries around personal injury case values, connecting people to the tool through organic search.
Visit CaseValue.lawFull Portfolio
See more of Max's work — including case studies from performance marketing, web development, and data tools — at maxgoldbergonline.com.