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.