Behance

Finally got my ass on to Behance. I needed an online portfolio and it seems to get good reviews from all my creative friends. There are several online portfolios and I’m thinking of getting on to a few of them.

Behance seems pretty straightforward, but I wonder if it isn’t a place where it becomes easy to get lost in the absolute deluge of stuff that gets posted there. I posted some stuff, and 20 hours later went back to post some more stuff and also to have a look at what else had been posted by others. Page after page of stuff. After a while I stopped actually looking at other peoples stuff and just out of curiosity started to see how much had been posted. 12 items per page. After just shy of 150 pages I found back the last thing I had put up. Wow that is a lot of people putting up a lot of material. I realize that quite a few disciplines are represented, but that is still a pretty staggering volume of work being shown. I suppose as a quick way to show a prospective employer or client some of what you’ve done it’s fine, but as a random showcase for your skills, I wonder how well it does.

Another thing I realize is that I need to take much better pictures of my stuff. I don’t have a great camera, and for the purposes of a blog, where I just want to quickly throw up what I've done to share, it’s fine. I tend to have a ton of ideas in the hopper that I’m working on and want to get to. I finish one thing off, snap some shots, process and edit them, throw them up here, and then it’s off to the next project. But that process of getting photos, downloading them on to my computer, sorting what is okay and what isn’t, rotating them, cropping them, editing them, saving a smaller version, putting a watermark on them, flattening that - I shudder to think how many hours I’ve spent on that in the time I’ve been doing this blog. Hundreds of hours. Weeks of time. Some of the steps I’ve created actions for and I can just batch them, saving me some time. Some things still require a human hand though. Selecting, cropping.

For the sake of an online portfolio, and looking at the high quality of photography others are using to showcase their work, I feel decidedly inadequate at some of my half assed photos. Time to devote some more time to taking some better photos. *sigh* But...lots of the product designs I’ve glanced at seem to be 3D renderings. Now I’m impressed by the ideas shown and the ability represented by the 3D renderings. But I feel somewhat more confident in the fact that I have actual products to show. A mockup is great and all, but to my mind it’s trumped by a physical object. Unpolished as some of my items may be, it’s considerably further along the process than a rendering is. I suppose that if I had gotten a proper education as an industrial designer, I would place more emphasis on the rendering part, but I’m merely an amateur tinkerer. I just want to get on to the actual making. To me the proof is in the pudding. I suppose also that it really depends on the item being created. For some things a detailed rendering to present to the client may be the only feasible way to go. For sewn goods, if someone wanted me to make a...messenger bag say, I could likely whip one together faster than I could do a rendering of it. And an actual object the client could hold in their hands might do more to sell it than a rendering could.

But hell, if I had access to the software, I would likely love it to bits and be teaching myself to use it and creating all sorts of nifty stuff with it.

All right. Enough writing. I have to get back to working on the logos and typefaces I have on the go right now, so that I have something more to feature on Behance. And here. And maybe Coroflot soon as well. And maybe Deviant Art. And....