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- 6 January, 2012 -
- Marketing -
- Tags : brand, personal identity, portfolio, self promotion, site
- 8 Comments
So, a couple of unrelated conversations—one with a client, one with a friend—got me to thinking about how designers are being more or less corralled into pens to display and move their work around the web.
There are several places designers are usually encouraged to display their work—sites like Bēhance, Coroflot and Dexigner, all easy-to-use, requiring no detailed technical knowledge to host a portfolio, all with a pretty robust set of social tools surrounding the artist.
That seems great upon first look. But the reality of the net is that it’s a brand game.
If you own your brand and platform, if you constantly update and use it, you’ll own your recognition. These sites, while offering a lot in terms of ease and community, actually may detract from a designer’s ability to present, control, and curate the conversation which naturally arises around the work.
I say this because of two conversations. The first was between me and a client, Amy Langfield, who I’m doing a site overhaul for. We’re going to be redesigning and revamping her site’s entire infrastructure, design, and publishing platform over the next few months.
Right now, Amy’s the go-to source for a resident’s knowledge of New York City. She actively searches out things like when all the museums have free days, easiest methods of transportation during spreads of hours, a fairly comprehensive list of upcoming performances.
Amy told me that her site, newyorkology.com used to be the top Google result for finding free or cheap tickets to the Fashion Week festivities in Bryant Park. “Why’d that change?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “NBC New York asked me to write a story about doing Fashion Week on the cheap. I figured that it’d be a great plug for the site, but what actually happened was the exact opposite. Ever since that story published to nbcnewyork.com, I’ve been ranked much much lower in Fashion Week search traffic from Google. The act of giving my knowledge to a larger brand absolutely swamped me.”
That struck me. I’d never considered it before, and it’s a little unnerving. Based on Amy’s experience, as it translates to designers hosting their portfolios at larger sites, you could actually be reinforcing larger brands’ dominance as the go-to places for searches for your work. Rather than enhancing your visibility as a designer, you could, in fact, be drowning yourself under a sea of talent. Freaky.
The second conversation was with my friend Anil Dash. He’s the founding Director of Expert Labs as well as a founding partner at Activate, and has been an active participant in and proponent for online communication since, I don’t know, the middle of the nineteenth century, when we met. He also writes on his own, publishing first at his own site, then circulating to other sites, making sure they all link back to his original. (That publishing model’s a really good example to follow, by the way.)
A few days ago, he pointed out the stark difference in quality of commenting across three sites. First his own, second paidContent, and third Facebook. Note the crazy amount of difference in tone. The comments at his own site are thoughtful and well-written. paidContent’s comments largely focus on how long his piece is, and the Facebook comments are silly little “thanks for the post!” pieces of nothing.
The lesson here is that the conversation about your work is always going to be strongest when visitors are actively engaging with you, and weakest at other venues. Own your platform, own your soapbox, and you own your identity. Don’t give it up to some third-party publisher.
thank you for this! i’m about to start a 2012 overhaul of my online self and have been wondering where to begin, as I haven’t done this since dinosaur days. This narrows the sea of options for me, which is great because I was feeling quite overwhelmed.
Patric, this is an interesting argument, but I think that it underestimates some of the benefits of these sites. It’s not just that they “[offer] a lot in terms of ease and community.” The social nature of them is very different from a personal site too, and it’s really powerful. In many ways they encourage a kind of dialog that would not be possible on stand-alone sites; they help designers get a context for their own work and engage in a kind of ‘conversation by portfolio sample’ where people try to raise their game because there’s so much good stuff there.
I’m not saying this is better than maintaining your own platform, because there’s a great case to be made for that too (though I’m not sure you’ve fully made it yet here). It’s different though, which doesn’t mean it’s worse; I would venture to guess that just as many people, if not more, have benefited from being on these portfolio sites as have benefited from running their own sites.
hi khoi—there’s one pretty important aspect of the discussion which i didn’t make clear, and your comment pointed it out.
whenever i consider putting a portfolio or any work in public, it’s a sales piece first and foremost, and reaching other designers’ eyes is pretty much the last thing on my mind.
as a tool for getting younger designers together, maybe if they’re not so concerned with building a brand for themselves, the sites are great. but for brand-building and identity ownership, they’re too homogenous.
the thing these sites do that i *do* like is create a shopping mall community for art directors and art buyers. i personally have gotten lost looking in little pockets of talent, and i love finding them. but it’s much more of a “shopping” mindset when i do that, and i never remember each person’s individual name. i bookmark them with notes to my evernote account.
That may be true and I think it’s a logical argument, but it’s not necessarily the reality. I’m willing to bet some clients and employers do find great talent through these sites. But that would be conjecture on my part. I think real research on this question would be helpful; it’s something I would think an organization like AIGA would do well to invest in, if they weren’t so busy railing against spec work.
You mentioned Behance, Coroflot and Dexigner, but what do you think of Dribbble? I know for sure that many startups ‘shop’ for talent through that service, which I think offers quite an inventive take on the notion of portfolio sites.
I’m not sure exactly how I feel about dribbble, to be honest. the social aspect seems like a waste of time. but that’s just me; I’ve never been one to put much credence in what another designer thinks about my work in a context like that.
that’s not to say that I think social portfolios are a waste of time for everyone—I’m not particularly social about my own work.
Hi Patric-
Having seen a lot of the data related to how creative talent gets found, tracked, and hired online, I think the strongest case for leveraging platforms can be summed up in two words: lead generation.
Those who search for and hire talent are seeking an organized and efficient way to do so. If everyone restricts themselves to their own island (siloed website), then the only people that will find you are people who already know you. Many online platforms (including Behance) are trying to optimize discovery (by field, past client, location, etc…). NEW opportunity comes from generating leads by distributing your work in a controlled but efficient way.
But I agree with you, you need your own space and branded site on the web as well. Our team realized this a few years ago and ultimately created ProSite to help people create and fully customize their own websites while keeping them in-sync with Behance (and LinkedIn, etc…) to get the best of both worlds.
Great post and points, thanks for prompting this discussion.
edit: Scott is founder and CEO of Bēhance; i’ve added a link to his product ProSite in the comment and his avatar.
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