I had another strip in my mind, all ready to go today, and then last night I was checking out the differences between AIGA Design Jobs’ portfolios and the straight-up Colorflot set. I was speaking with a friend of mine recently who jumped back into freelance life and as a longtime AIGA supporter was going to use their service rather than Coroflots’s, and I became curious as to the differences. I’ve gotten way into Coroflot lately because of upgrades they made late last year that make it a lot easier to use and give some pretty basic friend/follow functionality. I believe (because no-one I’m following ever seems to make any updates) that when they do, Coroflot will let me know if Steve or Jeff drop some new work up there.
In theory, again due to a shortage of people thinking it is as awesome as I do, this would be a fantastic way to keep up on the work my friends are up to. I pretty much always want to know what my friends are working on, because many of them are better designers than me, and I want to see what I should be doing if I want to stay cool. Rather than hitting up 25 different websites that probably never get updated, if everyone just plugged their new work into their Coroflot page (and dude that part is easy), everyone gets to stay up to date with everyone else.
That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. The profile summary and resume text field’s inability to handle even the most basic html styling comes to mind. But it’s when I looked over the port to AIGA Design Jobs — formerly my mecca of online portfolios — that I saw something that really needs some fixing. The AIGA set is basically a stripped-down version of the full Coroflot feature set, meaning that when paying for your AIGA membership you actually receive less functionality. Also, it bares stating that Coroflot’s site is set up with a prettier and easier-to-use UI design, so when you port it over to AIGA’s CSS styles it just kind of goes all ugly and, in typical aiga.com fashion, becomes harder to use.
As I recall from my days on the AIGA site, there is a button to publish on Coroflot simultaneously, a feature I wholeheartedly recommend. When you do this, I believe the AIGA sticker is added to your profile and that’s what you get for your membership. Hopefully full feature parity is in the works, because many of my friends have, for some reason, chosen not to hit that simultaneous button on their profiles.
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Nate Voss is a designer, illustrator, talkshow host and design journalist. Working in Omaha since 2001, Nate served four years on the Board of Directors for 
Donovan oversees all creative development at
That’s interesting…I never thought of it like that. I have been to the Coroflot web site but dismissed it since I already have two sites of my own that display my work and that I use as a “portfolio”. I would suspect this might be why many designers don’t make use of it. It never occurred to me to use it as a networking tool to stay up to date with the work of my peers. I’ll have to take another look at Coroflot. Nice post Nate.
You’re right, portfolio sites suffer from the tower of Babel problem, and much like the days of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe, you’ve got problems with trapped data that isn’t portable.
Not to mention the fact that most designers still go on their own site to showcase work. After all, aren’t designers supposed to show their ability to _design_ the site as well?
And there’s the all important question of why? Who looks at portfolios on Coroflot (or AIGA for that matter)? Fellow designers, potential employers, small business owners looking for freelancers. I’ve had a few potential freelance clients cold email me from AIGA, and even some potential employers who are actively recruiting, but nothing ever became of either.
I have a page on AIGA Design Jobs, but since I can’t use the same login for the Coroflot site, I never bothered setting one up there.
Thanks for the shout-out, Nate. I’m pretty sure this is the first time Coroflot’s been immortalized in comic form, and it’s kind of awesome.
Glad to know the networking functions on the site are turning out to be so useful. All the friend/follow and Likey and Gallery stuff is mostly aimed at letting designers link up with other designers and follow their work, so reading a post like this is a nice indicator that it’s actually working.
C
Nate – great post and thoughtful points. i have found behance.net to be most helpful on the portability side of things. my work has received about 12x the number of views (and some of my work is now streamed to typographyserved.com as well). but the bottom line for me is leads. and i’ve gotten the most from behance.net – but a good number from aiga as well.