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December 1, 2009

Carbonmade – Your Portfolio, Your Way

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Working as an artist or designer means honing your skills and perfecting your craft, but it also means finding a way to effectively market yourself, too. That’s where Carbonmade can help. Carbonmade is a site that helps artists and designers display their work online, even without any HTML or web design expertise, by allowing users to create simply designed and aesthetically pleasing portfolios in a matter of minutes.

Even without any web experience, artists and designers can upload their artwork and create an online portfolio using Carbonmade’s simple management tools. Start building your unique web portfolio instantly by selecting a theme or designing a layout from scratch. From there, you can upload artwork and begin adding titles, tags, notes, and client information for each piece. Set up your portfolio to advertise your services as a freelance designer, and add Google Analytics to your portfolio to get a better idea of how many visitors are checking out your site.

Each Carbonmade user gets a unique sub-domain website address for his or her portfolio, which makes advertising and linking to your portfolio a snap. And because Carbonmade is not supported by ads, individual portfolios look professional and clutter-free. Whether you’re a novice designer or a professional artist looking for a better way to market your services, Carbonmade is definitely a site worth checking out.

Practical Uses:

  • Display your artwork online
  • Advertise your services to potential clients
  • Keep all of your work in one centralized place
  • Share your artwork with Carbonmade’s online community

Insider Tips:

  • Use Carbonmade’s management tools to organize artwork by style or type
  • Upgrade to a paid plan to upload Quicktime videos to your portfolio
  • Start using Google Analytics to monitor the traffic coming to your portfolio
  • Tag artwork to share it with others in the Carbonmade community

What we liked:

  • No programming knowledge necessary to create a professional-looking portfolio
  • Abundant options for portfolio layout and overall design
  • Drag and drop function makes it easy to organize artwork

What we didn’t like:

  • Users can only upload 5 projects and 35 images to a free account

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: 2006
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: New York, New York
  • Founded by: Dave Gorum, Jason Nelson, and Spencer Fry
  • Web site: http://www.carbonmade.com

Costs:

  • “Meh.” plan is free for up to 5 projects and 35 images
  • “Whoo!” plan is $12/month for up to 50 projects and 500 images

Comments

  1. Graffi

    A totally other alternative but much cooler is http://www.ahead.com. It’s based on a zooming canvas and you can layout your portfolio anyway you want with the Adobe like editor. Even Grey has used Ahead to build their web site and show case their portfolio site http://www.grey-kbh.dk. I also love this portfolio http://ahead.com/c49LnIM_vjj58QM6oRmWzk/dv-wk-BVDhiBzqpITNTc_y

  2. Interesting Post, Check out another alternative Pixpa (http://www.pixpa.com) – smart portfolio websites for creative pros.

  3. There are a lot more options out there now for easy portfolio building, and I’d like to mention http://www.brushd.com as one of those. In addition to the portfolio it offers awesome blogging that lets you use things you already have, like your Flickr or Deviantart, and automatically makes them blog posts!

    Portfolios shouldn’t be made and forgotten, your potential clients need to know you’re active all the time and that’s why making your work easy to follow and find is so important!

  4. Yo, you should check http://www.electrofolio.com guys, it’s good and it is HTML 5 for visitors but uses a fantastic Flash editor web-app. Have a go: it is FREE!

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