9 Free Online Portfolio Sites for Industrial Designers

1. Behance Network

About: An unbelievable service, and the level of professionalism and quality of work is amazing. Their one-line description is, “A free platform for the world’s leading creative professionals.” Behance was started by 99% a amazing site, focused on, “Making ideas happen.”

Features: Join groups/circles – Well formated display of portfolio – Tip Exchange from members – Job board – No limits on portfolio size.

Cost: Free, but you have to request an invite to join.

2. Coroflot

About: Coroflot could be considered THE place to host your Industrial Design portfolio. Total users on Coroflot is over 150,000. Even though they range from textiles to architects, there are over 900 Industrial Design users. A perfect place to network with some of the top designers in the world. Coroflot also provides a job board, and employer directory.

Features: Stats on profile and image views – Organize your portfolio into sets – Advertise on your site by creating badges – Network with friends – Job postings – Advise Blog

Cost: Free

3. Carbonmade

About: Carbonmade is a New York based company, and they know a little something about design. They offer different formats and styles to display your work.

Features: Dead simple signup – somewhat cool layouts to present your work

Cost: Free and Paid. Free gets you 5 projects and 35 images. Paid is $12/month and you get 50 projects with 500 images and 10 videos/flash. 12 bucks also allows you to have your own domain, with no ads, and ability to call them for help (tech support).

4. DeviantART

About: DeviantART has over 12 million artistic members. Create a profile, upload your work, and begin networking with a whole range of people. You can even sell your artwork.

Features: Galleries – Portfolio layout – Messaging/chatting – Critiques – Journal – Profile page (design wise, you could compare it to myspace) – Quality of work is all over the map

Cost: Free

5. Flavors.me

About: Allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the internet. If you have a blog, flicker, Facebook, and Linkedin accounts, and would like a central hub for them, Flavors.me is for you. It takes 5 minutes to set up and looks amazing.

Features: One place to coordinate all your online profiles.

Cost: Free

6. Facebook Profile and Fan Page

About: If you haven’t thought about it yet. You can create a photo album on your Facebook profile called Portfolio, then load as many images as you want. Many people set their profile privacy settings to private, which makes their photos hidden to the public. If that’s the case you can also create a fan page just for your portfolio. By nature, fan pages are public, and indexed by search engines.

Features: Access to a network of over 400 million people (obviously many of these are in high school, but still a great place to find and network with professionals)

Cost: Free

7. Shown’d

About: I haven’t tried Shown’d yet, but it looks great. They have a free demo, so you can try out the admin user interface without signing up. It seems easy. Although you can showcase your design projects, the ability for an Industrial Designer to network looks limited. Limited because there aren’t any id-ers using the service, or at least they don’t have a category for them.

Features: Excellent UI with drag and drop – Easy to setup – Job board – No limit to portfolio size

Cost: Free

8. Flickr

About: How can we forget Flickr? Or for that matter any photo sharing service. Flickr allows you to create galleries and share them as a great slideshow. Simple, straight forward, how could you possibly need anything else?

Features: Great organization – Slideshows – Huge database, that’s searched frequently – Simple

Cost: Free

9. Google Profile

About: Even though a Google Profile could be considered one of the most important (accounts to have), to many this feature is still a secret. It’s much like Flavors.me. It allows you to link out to all of your online accounts. The main benefit comes when someone searches for your name. Bingo, you show up on the first page (although at the bottom). Setting one up is easy, if you have a Google account, you’re halfway there. Once you’re logged in, click on Settings in the top right corner. Then click Google Account Settings, and then Create a Profile (next to the crazy smiley face). Be sure to add your Flickr/Picasa portfolio, and ta-da your portfolio will show up on the first page (if anyone searches your name).

Features: Central hub for your online accounts – Bio area – Add your portfolio via Flickr/Picasa – Show up first on SERP – Google – Google – and did I mention Google

Cost: Free

Did I miss one? Give me a suggestion for number 10.