24
Aug
Solutions For An Awesome Online Portfolio
Posted in Blog
A common question that we receive from designers is about places they can upload their portfolios to online. Sending PDF’s to clients and employers is tedious and time consuming. So what is a designer to do? Following are a few of the solutions that are available out there.
Set up a website
This might seem daunting, but is actually easier than it is perceived to set up a portfolio website. WordPress is a great platform for this, and many hosting providers offer 1-Click WordPress installs. Here are some examples of the themes that are out there.
The major benefit of keeping your own website is that it remains your own space, meaning that it is hosted on a server that you “own” so there’s less of a risk of you losing your files if the service provider decided to change their policy or simply went belly up.
Designers can also upload a PDF version of their portfolios as a regular file download so clients and employers can keep the latest portfolio or resume as a reference.
deviantArt Portfolio
The deviantArt portfolio feature is easy to set up, free, and you can also get your own domain through them for a small fee. The drawbacks to this is that it isn’t as flexible as having your own site, but it is easy to update and you can import any files that you have on your regular deviantArt account.
Upload the PDF to Issuu
Issuu is a website that allows you to upload documents for online viewing such as magazine, portfolios, presentations, etc. This is the least flexible of the three options and is not recommended. This lets people view your portfolio in the browser, and they also have an option to download it. You can also embed it into a website of your own. This is probably the quickest of the three options but it’s the least desirable because while it relieves the designer of having to email their portfolios out, it is still tedious to browse and difficult to update.
The deviantArt portfolio is perfect for a “quick and easy” setup without losing the flexibility and the easy updating, and is the recommended option.
Honorable Mentions
The following are great options, and some are better then the ones that were previously mentioned. However we felt that they were more well known than the former options and we wanted to introduce new options.
We hope that this was helpful. We will continue to update this with any new findings and more in-depth recommendations.
Designers can also upload a PDF version of their portfolios as a regular file download so clients and employers can keep the latest portfolio or resume as a reference.