12 Essential Tools to Build Your Online Portfolio

As a creative professional, you need a repository of your work that you can show other people. This is called a portfolio. Since we now live in the internet age where anyone can access anything anytime, it is imperative that you have an online portfolio. The only real problem is figuring out where to put your work – there are so many online portfolio tools and communities, it can be challenging to determine which one will work best for you. I’ve written this article to help you decide how to get your portfolio up and running ASAP.

Related reading: How to Create a Portfolio Website

Options for Building Your Portfolio

Dribbble

Dribble is a portfolio networking platform where designers share “shots,” small screenshots of the designs and applications they are working on. All types of creatives are welcome here – Dribbble is designed for show and tell – to promote, discover, and explore design.

The Dribble interface is pleasant and simple. The Shots boxes show many many people have viewed, commented, and liked a shot. On mouseover, a short description and timestamp fade into place. Clicking on a shot takes you to its page, where you get more details. Dribble allows users to create “buckets,” or curated lists of shots. Dribble also allows users to sort shorts by popularity, submission time, color, & project (multiple shots for one project.)

Dribble also features a “Find Designers” section, where prospective employers can search for designers by skill and location. Members of Dribbble who can post are called “Players,” and new members are called “Rookies.” New members sign up as “Prospects,” who have to be recruited by Players to become Rookies. Dribbble offers a jobs board for designers to find work.

Dribbble is a growing platform with a lot of promise – the gamification of just getting your shots posted (having to be recruited by an existing member) is intriguing and also useful to maintain the quality of the Dribbble community. Dribbble is a great place for designers to interact and discover each other, not to mention gain recognition and potentially find jobs.

Coroflot

Coroflot says they are the largest, most established, most diverse pool of professional creative portfolios in the world. Coroflot is an open system – there are no membership requirements, application processes, or invites. Coroflot gives you all the basics – a place to host your images and videos, sharing tools, a job board, & a featured member gallery. The presentation that you would expect for an online portfolio tool just isn’t here though – there isn’t any customization that you can do to the design of your portfolio – it looks disconnected; it doesn’t feel cohesive.

Coroflot’s job board works very well functionally – designers can contact employers, and employers can contact designers. Coroflot’s featured groups and member gallery do a good job of showcasing the most active and popular members to the Coroflot network.  Overall, Coroflot has good tools that perform their function with simplicity and ease. The signup process is almost nonexistent, and the site does have a large pool of designers and employers all communicating with each other. Unfortunately, as a designer, I want my portfolio to be hosted where I can either A) control the design (at least to some extent) or B) have something that already looks pretty nice.

In the end, Coroflot just doesn’t cut the mustard for me, mainly because it doesn’t look as good as other tools that serve the same purpose. As a designer, looks do matter.

Behance

Behance is a portfolio networking platform for introducing talent to opportunity. Behance is growing quickly, and attracts millions of page views a month. Behance also powers creative networks for top schools and organizations like Adweek, LinkedIn, AIGA, RISD, and more.

Behance allows users to explore all different disciplines of art and design in the “explore” section. You can filter the categories that you would like to see easily, which then takes you to beautifully presented project pages. From here you can comment, share, and view the artist’s portfolio (which are also beautiful.) On the back end, Behance features robust community tools like an activity feed, groups, performance statistics, curated collections (like Dribbble’s buckets), and even curated, branded sites (such as “Illustration, Served” – these sites showcase the best of the Behance network towards a wider audience on the web.

Behance takes pride in connecting talent to opportunity by way of these sites, as many recruiters view them to find top talent in a particular niche. The site also has with a dynamic job board. Behance holds regular competitions from recruiters, like AOL and Nike.  Behance is beautiful. The menus are beautiful, even the way and the time they take to animate. The site feels cohesive all the way though, which really lends to a fluid workflow for users to be able to use the site the right way – as an effective tool.

In addition to providing a free online portfolio networking portal, Behance offers a paid, hosted portfolio building solution called ProSite for $11 / mo. Prosite is a branded, white label portfolio (no Behance logos) that pulls from your exising Behance portfolio and allows you to customize your portfolio in depth, without any HTML programming. Prosite is really the meat of Behance’s portfolio offering, whereas Behance.net is the bread and butter for portfolio networking and talent recruiting.

Overall, Behance has (in my personal opinion) set the bar extremely high for everyone in the online portfolio / portfolio networking business. With beautiful presentation, robust functionality, top talent recruiters, and rich tools like Prosite, Behance leads the way in bridging the gap between talent and opportunity.

Carbonmade

Carbonmade is a personalized online portfolio building tool. It focuses on simplicity and beautiful design to make the process of getting your portfolio online both easy, efficient, and beautiful. Carbonmade has ingenious, quirky graphics and copy throughout their entire site which really makes you feel at home as a creative.

Carbonmade doesn’t feature any job boards or networking features – it’s strictly a tool to build a portfolio online, which is great because it’s simple and straightforward. Carbonmade’s portfolio presentation shares this sentiment with extremely straightforward and minimalistic design, which makes it stand out from the competition. Carbonmade banks on their simplicity to sell their product, and it works – having foolproof tools is really a great selling point, especially for newcomers looking to make their first online portfolios.

Carbonmade offers both a free and a paid ($12 / mo) offering; the free option is great for getting a feel for the site, but the paid option has all the features that you need to make a robust portfolio, like the ability to add up to 50 projects, 500 images, 10 videos, custom domain binding, and access to Carbonmade’s staff for technical support.

However, there is something to be said about the price to feature ratio that Carbonmade offers – cheaper alternatives like Behance’s Prosite provide much more robust tools and storage space for the price. However, there is something so personable, so artistic, so deceivingly simple about Carbonmade that it makes all logical rationalizations about features (almost) irrelevant.

Carbonmade is working on a “talent pool” for their network that hasn’t launched yet – I’m sure that when it does it will be every bit as simple and beautiful as the rest of Carbonmade, complete with ridiculously adorable graphics and illustrations.

All said and done, Carbonmade offers a ridiculously simple, unique, beautiful portfolio building tool that is sure to satisfy newcomers and artistic types who don’t need all the “feature bloat” that other portfolio tools offer.

ViewBook

ViewBook is an online portfolio building tool that focuses on clean design and image management. It offers paid options to showcase your images, and has a well reviewed iPad app for showcasing your work in person (when you hand someone your iPad. iPad required.)

ViewBook is only meant for static images, which sets it apart from the competition by defining their niche. On the front end, ViewBook portfolios are very simple and elegant, but still allow you to achieve a high level of customization when it comes to layout and theme. Viewbook’s back end is extremely quick and minimalistic, feeling much more like an app than a website, which is nice.

Viewbook offers support for Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, Fotomoto, Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, Google Analytics, Facebook, and Wufoo forms (which are a great and free service to create user friendly forms – superb for freelancers!). ViewBook sets very reasonable prices compared to other tools, starting at $4 / mo for unlimited galleries, albums, the iPad portfolio app, and 1000 images worth of hosting. Another $5 a month lands you single page portfolios and advanced customization options, along with the ability to remove the Viewbook logo and add another 1,500 images. ViewBook’s $19 / mo professional option allows you to create unlimited portfolio websites with album, text, and video dedicated pages, along with full customization, a 5000 image cap, and the ability to use your own domain name.

ViewBook really sets themselves apart from the competition by offering a much cleaner, simpler looking product than anyone else and appealing to freelance image professionals with massive storage space, options, and a great looking and responsive iPad App for showing your portfolio off in person.

Additional Resources

PhotoShelter

PhotoShelter is a portfolio building tool specifically for photographers. It features many customization options including white label branding, custom domain name, CSS / HTML editing, WordPress integration, and more. PhotoShelter shines for selling images with a built in shopping cart that pays you instantly and allows you to self fulfill orders however you like – you can sell rights-managed or royalty-free photos in 16 different currencies with a built in pricing calculator!

Photoshelter features advanced marketing features to help you get found on the web, like SEO and analytics tools in addition the ability create virtual agencies with other photographers on PhotoShelter. Photoshelter also features a robust image management system, including advanced FTP distribution & access, password protection, private invitations, batch downloads, and more to help you organize and deliver work on time. This feature of Photoshelter makes it absolutely stellar for photographers as an all in one solution.

LogoPond

LogoPond is a free tool specifically for logo designers that allows them to showcase their logo designs and receive feedback from the community. It allows users to request critiques, comment, and use their forum to communicate. Logopond looks nice, but doesn’t offer many features and is full of advertisements – which is ok, since LogoPond is a growing platform.

Subfolio

Subfolio is another DIY framework that allows you to manage and configure your own portfolio and beyond on your own server – Subfolio features support for themes, users, and even groups. Subfolio is based adding all of your folders of images, documents, video, etc into one place – literally – you just upload everything that you want to showcase on your website into one folder, and Subfolio automatically creates page hierarchies based on what you’ve added. Like Indexhibit, sub folio is completely customizable and manageable by you alone (though there is support and a forum on their site.) If you know how to manage your own framework on your own server, Subfolio is a unique tool to help you build your online portfolio (or community) just the way you want to.

Krop

Krop is first and foremost a robust job agency for creatives. Many top recruiters looking for talent post job listings to Krop. In addition to their job board, Krop offers professional online portfolio solutions for $9.99 / mo. The portfolios are highly customizable, dynamic, and responsive, with advanced customization options. All of the portfolios are accessible from Krop’s Creative Database, the back end tool for recruiters that allows them to target creatives with astounding accuracy. Krop also features a section called Pluck’t, which showcases daily staff selection of Krop portfolios. If you’re hard up for a job, Krop is definitely a great tool to use to ensure exposure to recruiters.

SortFolio

Sortfolio is a tool for recruiters to find top web design talent. You can sign up for a free listing, or go big and pay $99 / mo to get larger interactive display ads, up to 6 large images on your portfolio, placement above other free ads, and branding (you can add your logo.) Is $99 / mo worth it to get listed? If you’re a web designer, it just might be. If you’re interested in checking out portfolio, you can always sign up for free to get a feel for the listings and upgrade later to promote yourself more fully.

Final Thoughts

This concludes my list of the 12 most essential tools to build your online portfolio. Whatever creative discipline you practice, you can rest assured that there is an online portfolio tool specific to your niche waiting for you to create your very own portfolio and help you market and sell your talent. There are plenty of portfolio tools that we didn’t cover here; however, this resource provides more than enough free tools to get your portfolio online today. What are you waiting for? Build an online portfolio to connect the world to your talent today!