Online Design Portfolio Review: Coroflot or Behance?

Why do we use a photo frame? Some use them to protect while others for photo enhancement. Bad photo frames can spoil the look of your photographs. Your selection criteria may include qualities, finishes, textures, detailing, pricing, appearance, materials & colors. If you are designer, sculpture or even a photographer, you know how difficult it is to showcase your creative work especially when it comes to online portfolio services. Design schools can guide you but never teach you what to select.

Are you a fan of Coroflot or Behance?

Well, as you know 5 Million projects?have been published on Behance by October 2013 over Coroflot having only?150,000 projects.

We asked about your favorite online portfolio service in the past. As you see, 26% of creative people use Behance Network over Coroflot having 19% for online portfolio showcase.

Generally, you look for the following features while creating an online portfolio showcase.

• Easy enough to create online portfolio projects
• Interface should be intuitive
• Drag & drop pictures into portfolio project folder
• Quickly add captions for each image
• Support most of the image formats jpg, gif, jpeg or png
• Well, that’s a pretty common list for most of the sites. So what makes one different by the way?

Any guesses!

So what happens when you are done with your portfolio compilation?
Once published, you should be able to share this online?via Facebook, twitter, etc.

You have successfully published and shared your work, now what! How does someone get in touch with you? For example, jobs, freelance, part-time or full-time work…
Since this post is about Behance and Coroflot, I will talk about the major pros and cons in between.?Let’s look at the following points…

Why Behance Network is more popular

• You can able to change the background color of your portfolio theme.
• Special project appreciation badge that is good for clients to check how popular is your portfolio.
• Connect with other designers by follow them.
• For feedback, you can add others into feedback circle.
• Add customized text caption and hyperlinks for external webpage redirection. For example, hyperlink to view a live functional website for a demo.
• Mailbox: It creates a bridge in between clients and designers without leaving your Behance page. If your work is good that matches with client’s expectation, you will receive a message in both Behance mailbox and your email client. You can revert back to the sender right away without even opening your external mail client.
• For adding a new portfolio or project, you can either select their default template or create everything from an empty page for advanced user.
• Adobe Creative Cloud users can share working project directly form Photoshop or Illustrator.
• Link Behance portfolio and showcase with your LinkedIn profile.
• Completely responsive layout that is good for smartphone, tablets to desktop users.
• You can download the Behance iOS App to manage your portfolio at anytime.
• Behance Creative Portfolio iOS App can help you to sync projects & showcase your work with clients while traveling.
• You can also use the Behance Pro Site to take your portfolio into 10 steps further.

Now look at why Coroflot is less popular

Coroflot has its own charm and there are people who still use this network to showcase. Somehow the entire page, navigation, usability & other features are completely outdated. Though they are focusing on multi-disciplinary approach, you are you bound to see industrial design project most of the time when you click on the project tab. However, I have analyzed couple of points for which this is less popular than Behance Network.

• There is no way you can change the background color of your online portfolio theme.
• You can only receive messages from others but there is no way you can reply back to the sender. The only option you have here is to “Forward messages to your email address”.
• Desktop users: Minimum image width is not defined by system, which means your project page would leave a lot of empty/white space.
• The new display options “Form Factor(existing), The Baseline, Descended & Coro Classic” are not at all intuitive.
• You feel like viewing a web page of 2004.
• Portfolio customization options are too limited starting from using bigger caption, adding hyperlinks to changing colors.
• There is no option to share your portfolio via social network or email after browsing.
• The mobile friendly page is not fully responsive, most of the links are also missing.?For example, where does the “Log in” link go on the mobile site?

Things we should expect from Coroflot

• Make the portfolio layout in responsive or create native apps for people who travel a lot.
• Should have the option to revert back to sender without opening them via email.
• Search box should be kept throughout all the pages.
• Display social share option by the beginning, sidebar or in the footer of each project.
• Fix the image dimension issue to give a consistent look.
• Add option for creating a group project by multiple users.
• Most of the navigations are confusing and not following any hierarchy. For instance, “Create New?Project” tab is less visible than its parent tab having Activity, Portfolio, Profile, Career Tools, Messages and Settings.

So which online portfolio service do you prefer, Behance or Coroflot?
Do share your experience by using the comment section below.