Online Portfolios for Creatives
Every creative professional needs an online portfolio. This used to mean having your own website, which for some people was a lot of work. Today, there’s no excuse. There are many online portfolios available for free that give illustrators, web designers, photographers, developers, and animators an easy solution to getting their work online. This article introduces several great creative online portfolio solutions.
Behance
Behance is one of the top online portfolio options for creatives. It offers support for images, audio, video, flash as well as embedded content from Vimeo, Youtube, Flickr and more. Social sharing is supported with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Behance portfolios are organized by project, which requires a description of the project itself and related content. Available template options are a blank canvas, image grid and a featured frame layout specifically for video and motion projects.
Behance is completely free. While it does show ads on user’s portfolios, this can be bypassed by typing /frame to the end of the profile URL, which displays an ad-free view of all your work. (This is the link to send to clients.) Behance’s real power lies in it’s broad network of creative professionals (similar to LinkedIn).
Creatives can connect with like other minded professionals, as well as feature their work on Behance’s very active job list. While not the easiest of the online portfolio options, Behance offers many options well suited for all types of creative professionals to display their work amongst the world’s top creatives. Click here to signup for Behance.
CarbonMade
CarbonMade is a slick, clean, and simple to use online portfolio. The main concept the developers have stuck to is to keep the portfolio content front and center. Users also get a custom portfolio url (youname.carbonmade.com), integration with Google Analytics, and CarbonMade is a freemium online portfolio solution and free accounts are limited to 5 projects and 35 images (no videos).
The premium account upgrade gives users up to 50 projects, high quality video, custom logo branding, domain binding, and more for $12 a month. CarbonMade does not currently offer social sharing features, but a new version is in the works so we may
see some integration with the social web on CarbonMade soon.
The development team at CarbonMade has a great sense of humour (Free accounts are Meh. Premium accounts are Whoo!), and the site is beautifully illustrated. This creates a pleasant user experience that creates one of the most satisfying solutions for an online portfolio. For ease of use alone, CarbonMade may be the best solution for many creatives. Click here to signup for CarbonMade.
Krop
Krop is one of the industry’s leading job boards, regularly featuring positions for top design and media firms. In addition to the job board, Krop offers users with an portfolio and resume on their Creative Databse. Krop is another freemium service. Basic accounts allow up to 10 images, a custom domain and a resume sections that easily exports to .pdf format.
Upgrading to a pro account unlocks additional features such as unlimited images, style switching, RSS, video embedding and domain mapping for $10 a month. The Pro account also unlocks all the portfolio styles, which are dark and light versions of Krop’s grid-based modern layouts. Krop is completely ad-free for all accounts. The following text from Krop’s signup page sums it up perfectly: “Ads don’t belong in a professional portfolio, neither do ‘friends’, ‘comments’, or links to other artists & websites.” Click here to signup for a Krop profile.
Coroflot
Similar to Krop’s setup, Coroflot is another high level industry job board that offers a portfolio solution to it’s users. Coroflot’s approach is not limited to just the visual/digital arts; it features sections for professionals in the architecture, industrial and environmental design fields.
Coroflot’s portfolio solution is completely free, offers a custom domain name, traffic stats, and is the only solution that we found that offers unlimited image uploads. That’s huge (if your portfolio is too). You can also like and follow other creatives on Coroflot, and use the site’s database of creatives to build your network. Click here to signup for a Coroflot portfolio.
Tags: creative, website design, website development, wordpress, writing