How to Make a Professional Creative Portfolio

1. Introduction Portfolio: Are you planning to put together your creative portfolio or in the process of updating an existing one? Find out how to make your work stand out by following a few simple steps. I'm, Martin, I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator, and AB certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, Disney, Google, Ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. I hosted several Behance portfolio reviews in the past, and I worked in many creative agencies to know what makes a portfolio look professional, and how it can improve your chances to getting hired or finding new gigs. In this course, I will share my best practices on how to build a digital portfolio using sites like B hands, dribble or square space. What are the most common mistakes that can weaken the impact of your work and how to avoid them? Your project for this course is to build or refine your own creative portfolio and share it here on skill share with me and all the other students. I cannot wait to see your work and how you present it and organize it to make an impact. 2. Portfolio - Behance : As I mentioned in the intro, in this part, we will be focusing on looking at all the different platforms where you can present your work. And most of the time I'm going to spend in B hands and ribble because in my personal opinion, these are the best places, but we will also look at a lot of alternatives at the end. So first, let's talk about B hands or B hunts depending on how you prefer to pronounce it. It has to be the most professional and most connected platform where you can find all kinds of different creative projects. You can search by sectors, tools, organizations, institutions, location, colors, what have you. And beans is actually part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. It was acquired, I think in 2014, And originally, it was founded by Scott Belsky, who's an amazing entrepreneur and creative mind. And he actually wrote two books so far. I've read both of them. One of them is the making ideas happen, and recently the messy middle. These are more for entrepreneurs and creative professionals who wants to start their own business or just simply creating something new. But I highly recommend to read these books if you are into these type of topics. I guess you can already tell that I really admire his work, and I've been following Be hands since the beginning and I've been part of B hens as a creative myself, using it to showcase my work. Be has went through a lot of changes and improvements since I first started using it, of course. At its current stage, there's a couple of things I would like to highlight that hopefully will help you to utilize this tool or platform and make the most of it. First of all, let me just show you how to search. But of course you can go to discover and then you can find all kinds of different curated galleries here. But you can use the search and filter option where you can really specify what you're looking for. You have creative fields categorized into popular ones, but then you can also find much more if you search here in the alphabetical list. But apart from the main filters on the left, you can also add additional filters, and this is where you can find a couple of interesting ones like color. So if you're searching for projects using a specific color. Let's say I like something with more the turquoise color, you can find a lot of projects that are using that color as the main element. And you will actually see your selected color code here on the top, so the hex color code, you can find there. You can of course, remove that and then refine your search based on a keyword or something else. Now, of course, once you start following people on B hands, your home page in a way is going to be curated based on the artists that you are following or even projects that you've viewed or appreciated recently. And just like almost every social media platforms these days, Bans also joined the bandwagon and has the story feature, which they call it work in progress, and you can find it here on the top. So let's say if we are interested to see what artists are up to in the illustration sector, we can just click on this, and then these will be snapshots of the current work that they are doing. You can find some really fresh ideas here and you can toggle through this or even just let it slide through automatically. You can send messages to the artists, let them know what you think of their work. This is a great way to be almost present and interact with the artists. The most likely would respond to your messages here because these are the ones that they just recently published. You can see that you can publish also videos or time lapses. It doesn't have to be just a simple static image. You're using the B Hans app on your phone, you can even sketch, so you can do a very quick sketch and just pose that as a story or as a working progress. Now, Bhans is an amazing source of inspiration. Even if you are not using it for your own portfolio, you can find so much inspiration here. And what you can do is to organize things into collections. Let's just say I select a project here, which I like. When I scroll down all the way to the bottom or even here on the side, I can always say I appreciate this. But I can also add it to a collection. So I can follow the artist. This artist I actually already follow. But if I want to save it, I can choose which collection I want to save it into. These collections, I can always go back and visit again. Let's just say I save it into illustration. If I want, I can go and check out the full collection with all the previous projects I saved in there. This is a great way to build a reference library with all the different artists and artwork that you appreciate and that you think would help you starting your own work in the future, or for certain projects, you can even create specific collections. 3. Behance Livestreams: Now, another very interesting part of B hens has to be the live option, which is basically live stream or even you can consider it a TV where you can watch creative professionals do their work. And they started doing this a while ago, so there's a lot of recorded shows already that you can watch. And these are also categorized. So if you're interested in, let's say illustration or UI and UX, you can find loads of shows there. So if let's say just go into this category, you can follow and check all of these shows. And what I really like is that because Behans is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud family, They even do shows on how they are improving tools, especially Adobe XD. You can see and follow how the tool is being developed. So you can see the developers talking and sharing the latest features they are working on. It's really exciting to see that and to be part of the development because you can actually communicate with them live while you're watching them. So It's great to watch the recorded versions as well, but I highly recommend for you to make it into a routine to join these livestreams because you can learn a lot from them. As someone who's also doing livestreams, occasionally, I know how much work goes into doing a livestream and how difficult it is to make them engaging. A B has the budget, of course, and they can reach and bring amazing artists to be on their livestreams. But still I think they are doing a brilliant job at it. So if you are into watching livestreams, highly recommend to check it out. Bens is known for very detailed projects. If you decide to use Bens, I highly recommend to check out some highly appreciated projects and see how much detail is on each of them. Normally, you would want to share not only your final artwork, but also the process that you went through, share thumbnail sketches, share all kinds of different mock ups that you created while working on the project. It's really important to present your work in a very stylish and detailed way. And also, it's not all about visuals. It's important to also use copy. So share the background of the project, the story behind it, and just try to include as much information as possible without obviously being overwhelming. So here's a good example. This Google Smart display project where we can see the actual description or what was the brief, the original brief. We can see the client's name, the agency, and even all the people that were involved in this project. And then we can see the actual artwork, scroll down. We can see some concepts here. We can see some additional versions, and then we can see the outlines as well. So without colors, we can see some additional graphics created, and we can even see some ideas and animations. And finally, thank you. This is also quite common. I became like a trend on B hands to have a small little illustration at the end, which almost like ties up everything and then have some links or even some downloadable assets in certain cases. So that is a really good length for a project when you upload it on B hands. I've talked to many creative friends of mine. Most of them, including myself, also prefer to spend at least half a day putting together project on B hands. So even when everything is ready, It's still important to spend enough time on putting the stuff together. Some people, I know, actually spend a whole week just literally putting one of the projects together to present it on B hands. So it is very important to spend enough time on putting the presentation of your work together. Try not to just quickly slap things together on be hands and expect a lot of appreciation to come in. It's really important to give yourself enough time to put everything together and create a really nice polished presentation. I would like to point out another really cool aspect of Bhas. You can show if you have collaborated with someone. So for this project, for example, I can show Al Murdondo who worked with me on this project, and of course, she has to be on Bhas as well, or whoever you are working with has to be on Bhas. But you can even form teams. So our team, yes, I'm a designer. We also have our own projects, and we can show all the team members. So it is a brilliant platform, both for individual collaborative projects or even creative teams showing the collaborative projects that they worked on together. 4. Portfolio - Adobe portfolio: Now, Behans is completely free, so you can create your account and use it for free, and I don't think there's any limitation of uploading work either. But what you get if you have Creative Cloud membership is the Adobe portfolio feature, which basically means that you can have your own domain, and you can synchronize projects from Behans onto your custom site. So if I click on Adob portfolio. This is just taking me to the page where it explains what it is and what's possible. But I can click on Edit My site, and you can actually have more sites. You can create up to five sites. I'm just going to go to perhniac.com site, which is my Adobe portfolio site. You can see that here on the left, you can choose which projects to synchronize, so you don't have to synchronize everything. And of course you can customize the template itself. You can decide on what pages to include. And there's another really cool feature, which I would like to point out, You might have seen my video on Adobe stock. Now, if you have anything that you're selling on Adobe stock, whether it's illustration, photographs or footages, you can actually showcase those stock assets on your Adobe portfolio. So you can see here this example where I have a few of my work that is also available on Adobe stock. So everything is really nicely integrated and easy to use. So to summarize Bhans is a brilliant platform, and I highly recommend to start using it if you haven't already created an account. And I recommend to only show your best work. So instead of showing all kinds of projects, focus it and narrow it down to your best work. And instead of focusing on quantity, you want to really detail and polish your presentation of the best projects that you worked on. So as long as you keep that in mind, I think you have a bright feature ahead of you on Bhans and you will be able to get a lot of followers and appreciations. 5. Portfolio - Dribbble: Now, another brilliant platform is Driple which is slightly different from B hands. And I would say most creatives would actually be on both of these platforms. So it's not a choice that you decide whether you are on B hands or Dripple, it's more like what you use each of them for. Now, unlike B hands here, you have shots, so it's basically a simple, small image that you upload. And these shots are almost like teasers about a project that you worked on. And I know a lot of creatives on Dribble who would include a link to a B hands project. So they would put a couple of cool images up as shots on Dribble, and each of those would link to the same project. So whoever wants to find out more information and the background and like a nice presentation, for that, they would need to go onto B hands. But on its own dribble is again, another platform where it's brilliant place to find inspiration and also say work into buckets, they call it instead of collections. But there's another very important difference on Dribble, although you can create an account for free, you won't be able to submit your work or create shots without first becoming a player and you can only become a player by being invited. Now, you can get invitations from artists who are already players on Dribble. Or there's a couple of other ways as well to get that invitation. But it is not a good idea to get an invitation early on. It's worth spending time on Dribble, get to know the platform and understand how to present your work as these simple shots because once you actually are invited and become a player, Your first submission or first shot is quite important. Let me actually show you how this looks. When you are on dribble, under shots, you can search for popular ones or artists that you are following, but there's also an option for debuts. If I click on that one, these are all first shots by recently joined players. Similarly, to be Hans where we had the little ending graphics saying, Thank you. Here, the debut shots has this trend of actually saying hello to the Dribble community. So instead of just posting a work, most artists would create a specific artwork like this one, here is a good example, which is showing the artist's style, but with an artwork that was created specifically to say hi to the Dribble community. So it's definitely worth taking your time first getting to know the platform before you introduce yourself. And once you became a player and you have a couple of shots and you have some interest from people starting to follow you, you can decide to go pro and upgrade. Now, let me show you this. It's here on the right side. We can go down, and then we can find a good comparison showing us that as a player, what options you have or what features you can access, and as a dribble pro user, which is currently $5 a month, if you are doing annual subscription, You can get all of these additional options out of which, I think the most interesting ones are the video shots, the recommendations for projects. This basically is helping you to find clients or clients finding you. And also, you get to sell goods. So in that way, triple becomes almost like a marketplace as well, where you can sell your artwork or even brushes or templates, and so on and so forth. Now, similarly to Adobe Live, or B hands Live. Dribble also has a lot of additional resources and inspiration for creatives, so you can find all of these under community. So they have a really cool blog. They have their own me taps, and they also have a podcast called Overtime. Both Dribble and Behance can help you to find jobs and to apply for these jobs. So and Dribble, you just have to go to jobs. And you can start filtering for locations, type of work, and so and so forth. While on B hands, if we go back there, we can again find jobs. Again, we can search for jobs based on whether they are full time, even internships you can find here, and you can choose again, the location. So it is quite similar on both of these sites. And when it comes to looking for jobs, again, it's good to be present on both of these sites and be active because there's a higher chance you can find a fitting role for yourself. 6. Portfolio - Other alternatives: Besides triple and B hands, of course, there's a lot of additional sites that's worth mentioning. And I just collected here the most famous alternatives, but this is not in any way an extensive list. And it would take hours to go through all of them and to compare them properly. So instead, I would like you to just check them out and see which one you prefer. Maybe I just mentioned that art station and deviant art are more for digital artists, especially art station where most concept artists and three D artists would be hanging around and presenting their work. Just to highlight a couple of interesting things on Cora flot, you can find the salaries option where you can search for certain job roles and locations, and you can see what can you expect? Like what is the average salary for that role in that location? And I like the fact that they also show you how many salaries were actually used to create this average from. And if you want to dig deeper, you can even find more statistics here, even gender split in that sector that you are interested in. I also wanted to mention that most of these sites are very simple to use, so no coding needed. It's basically dragon drop builders, all of them. But of course, if you want to create something completely unique, something that you built from scratch, you can also use tools like WordPress. Our website is also built in WordPress, we started off using it just as a blog. But of course, we have a lot of additional things going on since we started. And WordPress is a brilliant tool, which means that you can fully customize everything and you can integrate a lot of additional things into it like our podcast, recently, we started. If you haven't checked this out, you can find it on our site, and we have a few episodes already on it, but we are going to release more in the future. So if you like podcast, you can find us on Spotify and also on unes and all the other places that you would look for podcasts. And the tool that we actually use for our Wordpress site is called thrive architect and all the different thrive tools. This is again, something that turns Wordpress into almost like a dragon drop builder. So if you want to avoid hiring a developer or if you want to avoid coding as much as possible, Thrive is a brilliant plug in that makes wordpress much easier to use. I am not sponsored by Thrive or any of the sites that I mentioned. So these are all my honest recommendations, and believe me, I've tried so many different tools and ways to present my work in the last 15 years or so. 7. Portfolio - What to include: Now, if you are just starting out and you're not sure what to include in your portfolio, here's a couple of recommendations. Of course, you can include your personal projects as well, and even projects you worked on at university or college, it's not like a rule that you can only show work done for professional clients. Some interviews, they might ask you whether the projects you showed are for real clients or not. Again, it might not be a negative thing. It's just good to be honest about it. So if you include personal projects or projects that you worked on as a student, definitely make it clear that it's not for a real client. Another thing worth doing if you feel like you don't have enough projects or work to show is to take part in competitions. Now, we are working on other videos where I'm going to go into much more detail explaining how to utilize crowd sourcing sites. But just to mention it briefly, we recommend 99 designs being one of the best platforms where you can find projects to work on. And even if you don't win these projects, you can still showcase the work that you've done in your portfolio. Again, mention that this was done for a client on a crowd sourcing contest. And even though you didn't win, maybe you were a runner up, but this is the work that you created for that client. And then there's also talent house and creative allies where you can work on interesting projects like for movies, creating posters, or album covers, for artists. But again, these are contests and you might not win, but still the fact that you worked on something, it's enough to be able to present it in your portfolio if you think it's good enough for that. Now, if you just simply need some ideas on what to work on and what to create as personal projects or explorations or just to produce some additional work, but you don't want to be pressured to work for a real client and you don't want to be stressed out, taking part in a contest. You can also find really cool projects on 1 minute briefs and brief boy these are just simply giving you ideas what to work on. And I highly recommend to check these out as well. And if you just generally struggle to share the work that you do, I recommend this book from Austin clear and called show your work. It's a very quick read. It doesn't take long to go through it, but it gives you a lot of boost and confidence and inspiration to help you understand why it is important and how to present your work and show your work. And if you like this author, he has also two other really good books, generally written for creatives, highly recommend to check them out. 8. Portfolio - Less is more: The tips and techniques I'm going to share with you in this video are mainly based on my experience as a designer presenting my work, but also as someone who organized and hosted several portfolio review events where I've seen so many creative work and so many different portfolios. So there's a lot of things that immediately stood out and was really engaging, and there was also common mistakes that a lot of people do when they try to present their work. So I tried to collect all of these things that I've learned from my work and from seeing others work, and I organize them into five points. On each point, I'm going to go on much more detail, but without any further delay, let's get started with tip number one, less is more. This is probably one of the most important things to remember when you put together your portfolio. So you don't want to overwhm anyone with having hundreds of projects, or even several dozens of projects. Probably the sweet spot is around six to 12 projects. Maybe go up to 20 is still okay, but not more than that. And anything less than six doesn't feel strong enough. So normally when I've see someone's work, if it's around that range, I feel like it's a good healthy portfolio, which probably will have the best work from that creative, and it's not going to share all kinds of different things that are less relevant. So that's one of the first things to remember. And there's even a term the three C rule, curated, clear and concise. That's what you should really keep in mind when you are selecting your work to include in your portfolio. Here's an example, a professional illustrator and graphic designer, Barbara, you get a really good idea on the different techniques and even tools she's using, so we can see immediately, there's some pencil drawings, there's some ink drawings. But we also have the vector graphics here, watercolor. So it really gives us a good idea. So by just simply looking at the thumbnails of these projects, we already get a good sense of her style. And also the type of projects that she was involved in, like. We can see she worked on book covers, playing cards, and even packaging for products. So remember, it's not about the quantity and the amount of projects. It's about the presentation of them and that you filter out and really select your best work. Now, having said that, on behalf, of course, you will find other professional artists who share way more than 12 or 20 projects, So we can see this portfolio, for example, again, obviously, amazing illustration style, and we can see some really interesting projects here. We can scroll down and there's plenty of more here, so it's probably closer to, I don't know, 80 or 100 projects. So this is not a bad thing, and don't get me wrong. You can show more work than what I mentioned before. But I feel like there's a couple of projects here that are either the same project, just different images, or maybe I don't know, different takes on the same style. But in these cases, if you have very similar work, like I would say, these four illustrations here, maybe even this one should be all merged together into one project. So try not to overwhelm the viewer or especially if you're applying for a job, showing very similar projects next to each other because that's just confusing. And for someone who doesn't know you, you want to really introduce yourself and guide your viewer through the different type of projects or type of styles that you use in your work. So make sure you don't repeat things or create projects that are too similar to each other. Instead combine them together into one bigger presentation of various work. Here's another example of an artist that we've done an interview recently on our channel. So Toby's work is again organized, and you can find a series in a way, for example, under this project. So the monochrome creatures, once we go into it, it's explained that it's actually 18 illustrations, but it's all very quickly and briefly introduced in this project. So instead of submitting or putting up them as separate projects, it's really nicely curated into one single project. Even if you're not doing something as a series, if you see an overarching theme, consider putting them together into one project instead of scattering them around and just bulking up your portfolio. Once again, remember less is more. 9. Portfolio - Variety and Unity: Now, let's move on to number two, variety and unity. This is more about the theme of your portfolio. We already seen some of these artists and having something like a very distinctive style immediately visible once we look at the thumbnails of their projects. But there is a very important thing to consider. That's whether you want to harmonize and keep even the colors and styles similar throughout all of your projects in your portfolio or whether you want to show variety and all kinds of different things. Now, my take is that if you are doing varied work, you definitely want to show the variation and the full spread of work that you've done. But you also still want to make sure that the overall look of your portfolio is pleasing. So for example, this artist does a brilliant job at tying everything together. Again, he has a very distinct style illustration style, but we have still various colors used here, so there's not a color theme. But still, everything nicely connects together, and when we look at the work, we can immediately tallies the same artist. If you've seen the previous part of the portfolio topic, you probably remember me mentioning dribble where you have shots and you can only use like a small single image to present your work. The thumbnails on B hands in a way are like shots. So you really have to think about the framing and what part of the work that you are showing is going to be included there. So the selection and editing of your thumbnail is a crucial part of how your portfolio is going to look. So it's really that first impression that you need to pay attention to. And I've seen so many portfolios where the thumbnails were not that engaging. But once I clicked on them, I've actually seen so much interesting content inside. And once the artist improved their thumbnails, it's just got to like a completely different level. So you might have amazing projects, but if the thumbnails or even the order of the thumbnails are not pleasing to look at, then you will lose people's interest quickly. It is very similar to Instagram where you really have to consider what you post in which order you post them because that will give again that first impression when someone's checking out your profile. 10. Portfolio - Stay current: Tip number three is to always stay current. So a portfolio should be a living breeding thing. You shouldn't just work on it once and then let it stay like that for years because that's not how the industry works. People like to see your current work and what you've been up to recently. So try not to include anything older than five years, especially if you are active and you're doing a lot of things, try to concentrate on your more recent work. Of course, you can keep in some really successful projects. Maybe you work for big clients. That's nice to show in your portfolio, but aim for updating and refreshing your portfolio often. And if you're like me and then you forget to update your portfolio, you can set reminders monthly or quarterly to make sure that you don't forget uploading and refreshing your projects because that's also something that you can do. You don't necessarily need to create new projects or publish new ones. You can also just revamp order projects. Maybe it's a project, again, similar to what we talked about before that collects a couple of different illustrations or graphics that can be tied together. And maybe you've done similar ones. Maybe let's just say you've done sticker designs, and you've been doing more since you published it first as a project. So all of those new stickers can be added in there, and then that page or presentation is just going to keep growing. Now once you start following several artists on hands, you can see the way that they prefer to share their recent work, and you will be able to see certain artists who would share multiple projects on the same day. So this way of searching shows me a timeline of the artists I'm following and what type of projects and how many projects they shared recently. And we can see ustins the ladies work that we've seen earlier, actually published three projects Probably on the same day. You can see all these three are from her. There's also this other artist called Andre Duc who also shared three projects in a sequence, probably again on the same day. This can mean that they either worked on three projects simultaneously or maybe they just have a routine of sharing work at the end of each month. Then these were the projects that they worked on during that time. It doesn't actually matter if you upload multiple projects on the same day or you spread it out a bit more. It's not like Instagram where you have to post daily or weekly or anything like that. It's more about how you organize your work and how frequently you update it. 11. Portfolio - Tell a story: Tip number four is to tell a story with each of your projects. Now, we've already seen a couple of interesting projects before, but I'm going to show you a few more here as good examples. So keep that in mind that you're not just showing the final result. Your aim is to tell the story or the process from start to finish. Highlight obviously the most interesting details, but also mentioned the tools that you used, why you chose certain directions. You can even show things that didn't end up in the final work. Because that will also help to see your thought process. And that's what most clients are interested in and also fellow creatives. When I see someone's full process presented in a project, I am just immediately more engaged and interested in reading through and also following that artist because you can learn a lot from other artists workflows and of course, be inspired. But as a creative, remember, it's not just about showing the final artwork, it's about telling a story, how you got there, show the full journey. So here's another amazing artist, Brian Miller, and we can check any of his projects, and you will find that he is actually going really in depth explaining the whole workflow. So let's just check this one. If I go down, first, it just starts with the final artwork. But then there is a bit of backstory, exactly what he decided to do. And he's even sharing advice to other artists, things that he learned from doing this project, which is brilliant. But then when we scroll further down, we can see a very nice composition showing. On the top left, first, it's just simply the outlines, then colors, and then the final art test. And then going further down, there's a bit more explanation, a couple of other pieces, some more sketches, and so on and so forth, even showing the different color tests or variations, and then the textures, details, and then we get to a couple of additional drawings here. You can see obviously it's a lot of work and it's a very long project, but it just shows that some people actually spend a lot of time really thinking about how to present their work and explaining their whole workflow and the whole journey, as I mentioned before. 12. Portfolio - Tailor it: And finally, Tip number five is tailoring your portfolio. Now, this doesn't always apply, but if you are invited to a very important job interview. It's something that you are really excited and hoping to get, then it's probably worth spending some time and tailorizing your portfolio and deciding which projects to include or maybe even add some additional ones that you were not thinking of including before. So this is when it's useful to have Adobe portfolio, especially if your work is on B hands. This is something I mentioned in the previous part. So when you have a creative cloud subscription, you also have Adobe portfolio that something is free to use and you can connect it to your own domain. But most importantly, it is synced to your Bhans account and you can choose to include or remove projects. So you can enable and disable projects, and that way you can very quickly tailorize it. So I've done it in the past when I went to job interviews that I actually removed a few or even shuffled it around here. While on my be hands, I still had more, let's say I had 20 or 30 projects there, but in my Adobe portfolio, I only had a selection of them. Those projects that were more relevant to the client I was meeting or for the job interview that I was attending. When it comes to sitting down and presenting your work and walking someone through your portfolio, it is very important that you need to be prepared to tell stories that maybe are not even written down or just simply be passionate about talking about all the projects that you're showing in the portfolio. So definitely avoid saying things like, I didn't really enjoy working on this and this wasn't as much fun to work on because what you should have in your portfolio are the things that are more passionate about and the things that you want to do in the future. And this is a very important advice. So don't include anything in the portfolio that you don't want to continue doing in the future. So let's say you are mainly interested in logo design, and you've done several of those and you show them in your portfolio, and these are the type of clients and projects that you are trying to get. But at the same time, maybe you worked also on a couple of websites, and you also showed those on your portfolio, However, you are not really keen to work on those anymore. It is a difficult question because you want to show variety and you want to show different skills. But if you are not interested in doing websites and rather focus on doing more logos in the future, then what's the point in including those website designs in your portfolio? That's just a very simplified explanation, but hopefully it makes sense and keep that in mind, try to include projects in your portfolio that you can talk about and you can be passionate about and ignore the things that you don't want to really continue doing in the future. Although these were the five main points that I wanted to go through, I still want to talk a bit about how to utilize social media for again, supporting your portfolio. 13. 12 portfolio - Social media: But as I promise, let me point out a couple of things to keep in mind when you use your social media to support your portfolios. First of all, Pinterest is a great site, again, mainly to collect inspiration, but also to present your work. So besides using dribble and B hands and other sites to share your work, you can also put your work up as pins, and you will be surprised to see how much traffic and views you will get through this platform. Here's an example, three pins all leading to the same block post, but each of them got so many views. These two got more than half 1 million views and also lots of clicks. As you can see, pin tracks can be really effective, but also consider to create multiple pins with slightly different ways of presenting the same work because you never know which one will really perform well or better than the others. There's no restrictions. You can create as many pins as you want. It's a great way of supporting your portfolio, and you can include links that will go straight to behance project or even to your site, whatever you want. It's a completely free platform to use whatever you want people to find, whatever platform you want to bring more traffic to. If you are on Pinterest, make sure you check our profile out and see the boards that we created for helping you find inspiration in all kinds of different areas. Now, Facebook is also a very useful platform. Mainly, in my opinion, it's great for finding events and meet ups. Once you start joining different interest groups, you will be recommended so many interesting things, including events, workshops, and even webinars that you probably wouldn't know about otherwise. And last but not least, of course, Instagram is one of the best social platforms for presenting your work. It's a very visual platform. And you can actually use it as a portfolio. I've seen many artists switching on to using Instagram as their primary portfolio or their primary tool for getting new work. It is great for photographers, illustrators, graphic designers, motion designers, highly recommend to have an account and also make sure you keep updating it. Here it's probably the most important to be a bit more present. So you don't want to just have an account and never update it. Frequency here is much more important than on sites like B hands. There's a couple of things I've written down here that can be useful to consider. But there's one thing I would like to highlight. And that's the fact that you should be limiting yourself how much you use Instagram and in general, social media daily. If you're using an iPhone, you can set even restrictions. So let's say after 30 minutes a day, you will be blocked out of using those apps. But you don't have to be that harsh. You can just simply try to reduce the amount you use it because if you keep checking other people's work, in general, whether it's social media or even apps like Behance, you probably will feel overwhelmed and comparing yourself to others, and it can easily backfire. So what I mean is when you use Instagram to share maybe one of your work, don't get stuck on it checking out other people's work, more than, let's say, a healthy amount of time, 10 minutes. Because if you spend half an hour or more, each time you pick it up and use it, is just going to first of all, take a precious time from creating your new work. And also, it might actually stop you because you will be, again, comparing yourself to others, which is not healthy. So you have to find that fine balance between sharing your work, getting inspiration, but then also crack on and do your work. So remember, don't get stuck on social media. That's definitely not going to help you in the long run. 14. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go and check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.