Big question: what do you think about portfolio platforms?

I think sites such as Behance, Cargo, and Carbonmade are great for graphic designers who need a place to put a portfolio of amazing work, but just do not have the time and/or skill to craft a solid site for themselves. I also think they work as a good stop-gap for web designers who are looking to get their work noticed and land their first job, but don’t have the time or resources to get their own domain name and worry about hosting.

However, I think in the long-term, if you’re a serious web designer or developer, you ought to have your own niche carved out on the web. Ultimately, if you’re using a service, you are beholden to their up-time, terms of use, and design whims. I want to focus on those last two points. At any time, any service on the internet has the right to change their terms and enforce a fee where before something might have been free. Or, the layout you love for your portfolio might one day change (for the better or worse). I would think designers would want more control over that aspect.

Behance, for instance, curates the top creative work posted to their members profiles and has a Gallery section that gets an incredible amount of hits each day. Personally, I find getting my work selected and seen by their traffic always results in a good stream of commissions, from all across the globe. To be select, it’s not usually the case of just putting up a couple of nice shots of a finished piece. It’s more about telling a story through the work, some process, background and development.

As much as I respect custom-made portfolios and – as a designer – have a desire to create them myself, I think sites like Cargo Collective are wonderful, because they allow people to get their work online without having to write any code. That’s great for non-webby people like illustrators or print designers. And if you can write code, you can heavily customise the templates, so it’s the best of both worlds.

Use all the portfolio sites you can use. Put your work out there in as many places as you can. Don’t just keep your best work to yourself on one site, get your work on your own dot-com, but also on Dribbble, Forrst, Github, and so on. And once you have something to show, be sure to blog it too, which should be connecting to an RSS-to-email newsletter service like the one provided by MailChimp. The more lines you have in the pond, the more likelihood you will catch a fish.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets featured and template services like these do have drawbacks that people should consider. A huge downside to these networks is that your work is hosted among peers and companies that you might be in competition with for work. Imagine sending a client a link to your work on a hosted portfolio platform and instead of seeing just your projects they start clicking the people in your own network or the featured pages and find someone better or cheaper than you to do their project. Unless your work is better than everyone else around you, don’t rely upon them as your only portfolio.

In addition, I think these sites help make people lazy to the point of not pushing their own portfolio sites as the initial point of contact with the internet. For most of us our client work doesn’t really show our true personalities. As templates, neither do these hosted sites. So we should all have individual portfolios that allow us to visually and verbally separate ourselves from everyone else and tell the whole story of who we are. As the popularity of these sites increase many people have forgotten this and are getting lost in the crowd.

In an industry with the constant pressure of fast approaching deadlines, it’s often very difficult to find the time and ‘headspace’ to design and build your own personal portfolio site – even if you do have the time, you might not have the necessary skills to execute it. The likes of Behance and Carbonmade offer a fantastic solution to this. They provide an easily customisable and manageable framework that gives those with work to show a quick and easy platform on which to do so. For freelancers and enthusiasts looking for work, content is key. It may be desirable to have your own site that conveys your own personality, but potential employers will ultimately only be interested in looking at your work and what you can offer, and Behance and Carbonmade showcase it in a very simple, yet effective fashion.

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.

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