Mar 16th, 2010

All creatives, be it web designers, illustrators, photographers, fashion designers, artists, and all the rest, need to be able to get the things that they create out into the big bad world, or Internet as the case may be. For some of us (namely web designers / developers) it’s a little easier than others, because it’s our job. But no matter who you are or what your profession, we could all do with a little help to make life a bit easier.

In this post I’m going to talk about 4 of the best new and up-and-coming websites designed to help us creatives get our content out there. Some of them are so new in fact, that they are still in BETA testing, but they are definitely ones to watch out for…

Flavors.me

Flavors.me has been publicly available for one or two months now, and it’s a great way to collate all (or most) of your social networking information. It’s fantastic for someone who is active all over the web, but doesn’t have, or is struggling to get a solid online portfolio together.

When you register you get your own personal Flavors.me URL (e.g. flavors.me/username) and your very own one page customisable website. You can choose your own fonts, layout, and background image, and by registering / allowing access to all your other social media websites you can pull all this information into one place. For example you can input your Twitter username and show tweets, you can add a Tumblr or WordPress URL to pull in your blog, Flickr images, Last.Fm tracks - a whole load of things! Plus you can also add a little About Me section if you wish. In my opinion it’s the perfect quick and easy solution to not having a solid online presence.

Behance

Ok, so Behance isn’t all that ‘new’, but I thought it was worth mentioning because it’s a fantastic online resource. It’s been around for a couple of years and in terms of an inspiration source you really can’t get much better. You can’t sign up straight away, but if you send them a quick message telling them why you’d like an account then you’ll be allowed to register pretty quickly. This might sound like a painful extra step, and may be a bit pretentious, but I think it’s a good thing because it keeps the quality high and means that everyone who’s on there really wants to be.

Behance allows you to create your own creative portfolio with unique URL and add any number of projects, listing them in certain categories and tagging them with search terms so that other users can find them. It’s very flexible in terms of the content that you can upload - you can do video, audio, and of course images in various formats, and your Profile page is customisable too (to an extent).

If your work is good, and people ‘appreciate it’ then it’s a great way of getting noticed and forming relationships with other creatives around the world. And if the curators see something they like and put you on the home page, then thousands of people will be given instantaneous access to your work - now you can’t get much better than that!

Cargo

This is the first of two online communities which isn’t actually publicly available yet (but hopefully it will be very soon). However, if you do want access now then it is possible. All you do is send them a quick email requesting an account and they’ll usually reply with a link to a registration page.

Cargo is the most customisable platform out of all the ones mentioned here. It works in a similar way to Behance in that you can upload all your work, give it titles, tags, dates, but you can also add multiple pages and split your content out like a proper portfolio website (although to have unlimited projects and pages there is a monthly / yearly subscription). There are various free templates to choose from, which are all well designed, but there are also ‘premium’ templates that you have to pay for, but which are beautifully designed and sometimes very interesting to interact with.

However, the best bit about it is you can input your own code to customise each page exactly how you like. Once again, to have all the benefits of ultimate customisation you have to pay, but even with a free account you still get access to the CSS. Cargo is definitely worth checking out, even if it’s just to see what other people are doing with it.

Dribbble

Nope, that’s not a spelling mistake, that’s Dribbble with 3 ‘Bs’! This is the newest platform of all and there is a lot of buzz surrounding it at the moment. Unfortunately because it’s still in public BETA to get an account you have to be invited (much like with Google Wave), so if anyone has one then please send it my way!

The idea behind this is sort of like Twitter, it’s all about sharing what you’re doing, but rather than “What are you doing in 140 characters or less”, it’s “What are you working on in 400×300px”. You can follow people, or be followed, comment on work, or view a stream of latest uploads, so it’s great for getting feedback on work-in-progress before you completely settle on an idea.

The whole site is themed around Basketball (hence the name) so all the ‘actions’ have quirky little titles and give it a nice fun feeling, but to be honest because I don’t have an account I can’t really share much more about it! All I will say is that the standard is very high and it is likely to provide a platform for lesser known designers to stand on alongside the big boys, which is a good thing of course, but may scare some of the more well known designers off from demo-ing work, instead opting to only show finished designs - which will defeat the whole purpose. Even so, I’m really excited about this one and can’t wait to get access.

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By Chris Skelton