There are many ways of getting your work up online for others to experience. You get WordPress themes that do photo / design work display pretty well, and WordPress also recently launched an easier photo-portfolio platform, you get Tumblr blogs or even use Blogger to display your work. It’ also pretty easy to set up a site with Wix or Squarespace. Some leaders in design/creative networks use Cargo Collective as you can see here and here. But with all of these options, I would still stay with the best one of them all: Behance.
You may now ask why and I’ll tell you:
Behance provides an easy and customisable way of setting up your projects in a presentable manner. You have the option of getting a link that displays your work in a portfolio-like manner, which you can send to clients. You decide colours, sections, text and using the platform is super easy, understandable and user-friendly.
You get two free Behance apps. The one is a portfolio app which displays work in a very presentable manner and gives the option of ‘Airplaying’ it on an Apple TV, so you can present your work on a big screen, or you can just use the app to show your work. It preloads all your work, so you don’t need to be online to display it, which it does very elegantly. The second app is more focussed on the social aspect of Behance, where you can browse, view and share work.
Make stuff to Sell. Behance provides an option of tagging a specific image to be for sale. I haven’t used this functionality yet, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.
It also has Prosite, a professional portfolio setup with templates and designs which you can use to display your work, and you can use a domain of your choice. So, you can either have a domain using Prosite, or you can have an address bounce to your portfolio on Behance. It is up to you. The Prosite capabilities come at a cost of around R700 per year.
Adobe recently bought Behance. This is huge. The company who created and built the platform sold it to a company who they thought would be able to grow it to be as big as it should be.
Finally, it is a social network so you can see what the specific industry is delivering and what you can do to stand out, or to get some traction in the industry. It ranges from fashion design, to branding photography and web-design and each industry has a specified ‘served’ site, so it’s very well organised and easily filtered. You can appreciate people’s work by pressing a button, and people can appreciate your work by doing the same. This will give an indication which of your projects are the best received and most enjoyed.
Overall, a beautiful,’mostly free” tool to display your work. Here is my portfolio, if you like it, follow it!
