10 Great Portfolio Websites for Graphic Designers
As a graphic designer, your portfolio represents the best work that you have available. As such, it should be set up beautifully, with design being the last thing you have to worry about. In less than 30 years, the web has changed everything in terms of connecting and empowering people. The following 10 websites will offer you the best portfolio experience of all the sites that are out there.
Behance
Behance is an excellent portfolio site for graphic designers, artists, designers, photographers, and just about anyone else in between. It also serves as a great social media site, complete with comments, appreciates for your work, and even job postings. It also gives you the opportunity to follow artists and to enter curated galleries. The opportunities on Behance are many and the drawbacks are basically nonexistent. You’d be hard-pressed to find a portfolio site that provides as comprehensive of a social media experience, and you’ll feel like a real graphic designer/artist when you post your work nd get the opportunity to enter curated galleries.
Adobe Portfolio
Behance Pro has evolved into Adobe Portfolio. This is a platform where you can very quickly build an excellent site where you can showcase your portfolio for the world. All you have to do is pick a layout and then customize it, pick your own domain name as well as your font through Typekit’s list of them, and then sync everything up with Behance. This isn[‘t meant for creating highly personalized and complex material, but it does its job well at making a simple, comprehensive site. For the more expensive version, you get all of Adobe’s creative apps.
Squarespace
Squarespace is a website builder that really makes a difference. It allows you to fully customize your site while still keeping it to professional standards as well. It has sleek and responsive templates and also has a slew of Typekit fonts as well as Google fonts to choose from. The font selection alone makes it worth it. Squarespace offers a personal plan as well as a professional one that’s made for businesses. It is a little bit more expensive than its competitors, but its meant for pros and is highly polished.
Wix
There’s a reason why Wix is one of the most well-trusted website builders out there: it’s sleek, well-designed, simple to use, and it has plenty of well-designed templates. Wix is entirely free, but premium plans do offer some much-needed perks like no ads, bandwidth, and more storage. It keeps in mind everyone who wants to design a website, but it especially favors graphic designers out there. This is an especially good option for those who want a professional looking site for super cheap, or even free. This site delivers on its promise to be a responsive, well-designed, easy to use site.
Portfoliobox
This site was specifically set up for creatives and is great for blogs, galleries, e-commerce, beautiful profiles, and much more. It’s very easy to navigate for those who are going in with visuals in mind, and its portfolios are a testament to this. The free option is comprehensive on it own, but the paid version offers up the capability to give you a domain name, give you unlimited pages, blog posts, and products. You also get customer support, design templates, Google analytics, and much more. This is an excellent option for those looking for a professional feel.
Cargo
This simple yet effective portfolio site is a little bit different. It involves an application process to get in, so the members’ work is just a little bit higher quality. There’s a great community that goes along with this, and your work will look great on this site. Unfortunately, portfolio customization is limited. Applying for and then receiving a Cargo membership gives you a free service that’s fairly basic, and this offers 12 projects and three pages. Unless your portfolio is fairly small, you’ll want to upgrade for greater access.
Format
Format has beautiful, dynamic, responsive themes, especially with its mobile option. Format has a variety of pricing plans going from personal which gives you 100 images, all the way up to unlimited which you can guess how many images it allows you there. If you’re unsure of what you want to do, though, you can always get a free trial, which will allow you to sample a little bit of everything. Format is good for both those who are good with code and those who avoid it like the plague, as it has the option to either customize the code or use built-in tools to change up the page.
Carbonmade
Carbonmade is bright and cheery and is a big contrast to some of the more plain looking portfolio websites that are out there. It was created for designers and benefits from being more tailor-made instead of being more on the general side. It has featured artist examples and beautiful themes that are visuals-based. Even if you’re unsure about it, you can always give it a try with the free trial version. This is a great option for those who want to stand out.
Moonfruit
Moonfruit’s template designs are stylish, customizable, and cool. The blank canvas editor allows you some creative freedom, but it also suffers from the occasional misalignment, This is something that Wix doesn’t really suffer from. The style of Moonfruit’s designs more than makes up for it. Moonfruit’s totally free, but you can always upgrade to a paid plan to get more bandwidth, storage, and more pages. Moonfruit is a great option for those who want to get a bit more stylish and have more creative freedom. With that said, be sure to be aware of glitches.
Dribbble
Dribbble is primarily a design community where creative types of people can congregate and swap notes. It’s a great place to learn the form, explore, and show off your own work. The format is in shots, which are small snapshots of greater designs. Because of this reason, you might want to build a separate portfolio website along with Dribbble. Dribbble is a great place to build a portfolio on the side, discover others’ work and hopefully learn a little bit about the form.
Conclusion
While this list isn’t exhaustive, it should give you a good idea as to the options that are available to you when it comes to finding portfolio sites for graphic designers. You needn’t feel like you have no outlet for your creativity with these sites, as they have you covered no matter what you do.
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