Comments on: 1PT.Rule Comic: You Can’t Handle My Flot, Yo.

By: tim

tim — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:32:37 +0000

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.

By: Carl Alviani

Carl Alviani — Thu, 07 May 2009 11:09:24 +0000

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

By: Prescott Perez-Fox

Prescott Perez-Fox — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:21:03 +0000

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.

By: shughes

shughes — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:50:58 +0000

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.