Line25 is reader supported. At no cost to you a commission from sponsors may be earned when a purchase is made via links on the site. Learn more
In the era of social media, when everything is available with one click, more graphic designers are using a hosted portfolio to increase the reach of their work. Similarly, more clients are searching for graphic designers on portfolio sites. Your portfolio defines you and your work, and so it should be as good as possible to attract everyone’s attention. There is still a debate going on as to whether personal portfolio sites are not much effective, as it is difficult to drive traffic to a personal site. While hosted portfolio sites provide inarguable benefits like simplicity, rapid networking, and increased visibility. Also, as a graphic designer or digital artist, ensuring visibility of your work or receiving feedback is crucial. This allows a designer to improve their work according to what people like to see. It has become a major issue for designers to find a good platform that allows them to display their skills. Here are the 9 best places to showcase your graphic design work online.
1.Behance:
Behance is one of the most popular online platforms to discover and showcase your creative work and designs. They attract millions of people per month to remove the barrier between opportunity and talent. Behance is operated and owned by Adobe so that designers can sign up with their Adobe ID and also Adobe CC user has the advantage of posting their work directly to Behance using the creative Cloud. They distribute the work to other online galleries such as branding Served, Illustration Served, Web Design Served, and many more to provide maximum exposure to your work. You can search on Behance using creative filters (there are hundreds of them) by a specific school, color, country, or creative tool. Behance syncs with Prosite making them a customizable personal portfolio site builder. They believe that great work must spread efficiently around the globe and should gain the exposure it deserves. Graphic designers can also use Behance job list to look for creative and freelance jobs. They provide a great platform for people with talent to meet clients that value their skills.
2. Krop:
Krop provides creative graphic designers with the opportunity to share their work and resumes with leading design companies across the globe. It is a job board for creative professional and industries as well as a portfolio hosting website which is used by a talented candidate with different experience level and the world’s most respected creative brands. Krop has worked with brands like GUCCI, Google, Yahoo, Barack Obama, Apple, Nike, Guggenheim Museum, Martha Stewart Living – Omnimedia, ABC News, Facebook, Motorola, Netflix, MTV, HBO and many more. It has a wide audience of over 1 million visitors per month, and the company is owned by the same designer who first started it. it has simple tools to help you improve your portfolio pieces to match the industry standards. With Krop’s tools, you can build your portfolio and resume. It also offers professional templates and allows you to manage your work quickly. The basic membership is free that limits you to upload 10 images. However, you can go for the pro version, which costs $9.99 per month that allows you to access styling, custom gallery. Unlimited images, custom domain name and video.
3. Dunked:
Dunked provides the designer with a platform to create and maintain their online portfolio. It’s a good option if you don’t have many technical skills as you don’t need custom coding. In simple words, dunked is for anyone that doesn’t have much time or skills to create a portfolio from scratch. They allow you to develop a portfolio, embed your video or audio, customize fonts and colors, upload your images, choose a retina-enabled responsive template, and make some medications before you press the publish button. All of this without using a single line of code. They have a wide range of templates for various profiles. All of them are retina- display ready and fully responsive, and that’s the main reason for the site’s popularity. The site has over 80k creative professionals, from illustrators to designers to architects and models. Dunked offers a free 10-day trial so that you can try all the features available on the site. After which the plan starts from $6 per month to $19 per month, allowing you to choose according to your budget. All of these plans include HTML and CSS editing, password protection, additional templates, custom domains, and Google Analytics.
4. Dribble:
Dribble is a show-and-tell community for graphic designers, icon artists, logo designers, web designers, illustrators, typographers, and other creative professionals. The site was started as a small side project and soon evolved into a profitable organization that helps designers find jobs and share their work. Graphic designers on Dribble share screenshots of their work, process and projects. In-progress projects get most visitors as they like to get an inside look at the designing process. Because I designers share screenshots of their work, it is easier for users to browse through numbers of design pieces quickly. The site keeps its clients and designers updated with Facebook posts. Along with displaying robustness and creativity in design, the site allows clients to meet talented designers. This platform has triggered numerous transformations from freelance graphic design to a professional graphic designer. Dribble is not only a job board but also an online store and they even setup meet ups across the country. Dribble is free for a graphic designer. However, you can only upload screenshots and write comments if an existing community member invites you to the platform.
5. Carbonmade:
A programmer and an illustrator found Carbonmade in December 2005. This site was built to provide an easy and inexpensive platform for a graphic designer to post their designs online. Although the site was originally meant as a tool for designers, it’s popularity grew, and so they opened it for everything. This site takes the arduous process of building an online portfolio and merges in a creative world. The site is easy to use and has many interesting features. You can easily personalize your portfolio pages to make it look professional and aesthetically pleasing. Also, you don’t require any coding knowledge to set up and upload images on Carbonmade. The site is home to more than 500k portfolios and a team of a talented artist. Clients usually browse this site to search for talented graphic designers, so make sure to display your best designs on the site. This site features an added benefit of an excellent interface. The free version on this site limits you to display 5 projects with only 35 images. If you upgrade to the premium version which costs $12 per month you can take 50 projects, 10 videos, 500 images and other flashy, interesting features.
6. Coroflot:
Coroflot’s homepage shows that it is not just a site for web and graphic designers. The design portfolios in Coroflot have everything from rock climbing gear to candy wrappers to 3D printing. Coroflot was launched in 1997 and had over 2 million images and more than 150k design projects from professionals and students across the globe. While some hosted portfolio sites emphasis on graphic design, Coroflot encourages all facets of the design world. The site also provides an active job platform with an up-to-date design salary guide. They celebrate and promote the work of all design disciplines, including graphic, UX, architecture, 3D modelling, industrial, illustration and many more. They strive to offer space and opportunity for creative designers and hiring organizations to find each other. So whether you are looking for professional exposure, your next design job. Your next design hire or creative advice, you can go for Coroflot. The site is free for everyone so you can easily start your career on this platform as a designer and even find your dream job. The interface of the site is easy to operate so anyone can use it without much effort.
7. Viewbook:
Viewbook offers a collection of uncluttered and clean websites that allow you to describe the million-dollar words in pictures. They allow you to customize your own portfolio with simple design interface. The site focuses mainly on photographers. However, all designers are welcome to display their high-quality designs. They use the latest technologies which make their templates have cross-platform uniformity and the peculiarity of fast load time. The inexpensive subscription allows you to sell your designs online. It also provides the privilege to its members to choose their own domain name. Moreover, it has features such as Search Console, Connect Google Analytics, and Search Engine Optimization etc. The site is fully responsive and even provides a responsive portfolio allowing you to reach a wider audience. Viewbook offers various ways to showcase your designs, including mini projects and portfolios that can be featured beside your main website. Viewbook syncs with Aperture and Lightroom for easy image exporting. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial or pay $19/month or $190/year for cloud hosting, custom domain name and dedicated support.
8. Cargo:
Cargo is a simple portfolio creator, but it does not imply having fewer tools. The portfolios created using cargo are easy to customize and beautiful. Cargo has evolved from a system that runs SpaceCollective, which is a community-driven website that is used for exchanging ideas about current issues of our planet, universe and species. They have taken advantage of robust browser technologies, increasingly elegant image handling, and abundance of open-source products, maturing web typography, and e-commerce. Cargo collective website was founded by people that come from art and design backgrounds, and the site shows a commitment to support creative culture. The site looks like an art gallery. The front page provides continuous scrolling through illustrations, photographs, top-notch design work and magazine pieces. Designers just have to create an account after which they can start crafting a portfolio that attracts clients to your profile. The basic version includes 100MB storage and 12 projects with 3 pages. You can upgrade to the premium version for $9 per month or $66 per year for unlimited pages and projects, a library of templates, unlimited bandwidth, images, advanced HTML and CSS editing, and fonts.
9. PortfolioBox:
+
PortfolioBox is a simple online site that allows you to create a portfolio in a web browser. The theme available on PortfolioBox assists its members to create their own unique space on digital platforms. This is an amazing site specifically tailored for designers to craft for portfolios for creative professionals like artists, illustrators, musicians, models and designers. The site has great design flexibility, easy to use and intuitive interface. Their support is quite effective and has a good response time. With the drag-and-drop tool, creating a portfolio that suits your requirements will be easy. The site also comes with several different customizable themes so you can be sure to find the one that interests you. PortfolioBox allows you to merge pages from different formats in unlimited permutations and combinations. This site has a great feature that automatically adjusts your online profile to screen the size of the users. The free version comes with 10 pages and 30 images. However, you can upgrade to a premium subscription for $6.90 per month, so that you can access features such as 24/7 support, domain name and unlimited pages.
Now that you know where you can showcase your amazing designs, you should create a compelling portfolio. Most of these sites provide basic themes or templates that allow customization, so keep a structure in mind before starting. You should have a goal in mind to design a portfolio to help you recognize the steps you need to follow to achieve it. The basic version is all of these sites only allow you to upload limited projects which actually useful as you should only display the best pieces of your designs. It is also necessary to keep your portfolio up-to-date so that your potential clients know that you are continuously working on your designs to showcase the best designs. Moreover, you should encourage your existing clients or followers to share their opinion so that you can attract more people to your portfolios.
