However, with so many different platforms out there, choosing the right place to display your work can feel like a bit of a gamble. In this post, we’ll walk you through two great sites for creating an online portfolio—Behance, and Dribbble.
What Is Behance?
Behance is a social media platform for showcasing and exploring creative work. Adobe, the company behind the site, also owns leading software in the design industry, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and others that make up the Creative Suite. This tie makes sense as you’ll notice many artists on the site use Adobe software to create their pieces.
With Behance, you can display your work and share insights into your creative process. It’s much like writing a rationale to help your viewers understand the specs, the goal, and how you got there.
Within a project, you can add multiple types of digital media to help tell the story behind your piece or series. Once you post it, Behance gives each project a unique URL that you can share with anyone.
Since Behance is a social media site, you can interact with others in the community and gain followers. You can also receive feedback in the form of comments and kudos in the form of likes. Additionally, the site tells you how many views your work is getting as another metric to gauge which pieces perform well.
The team behind Behance works to showcase the top pieces on the site, which earns you a Featured badge if your work gets chosen. You can also create mood boards by saving others’ projects for inspiration or take advantage of the job board it offers the creative community.
What Is Dribbble?
Dribbble is a self-promotion and social media platform similar to Behance. Here, you can share your work, find inspiration from other creatives, and view a job board.
Like Behance, you can create multimedia posts that showcase your work and explore the work of other creatives—but you can only do so using one snapshot under the free account.
As for the social aspect, the community interactions work very much the same, but you save your inspirations to Collections instead of creating mood boards.
Behance vs. Dribbble: Which Platform Is Better for You?
While anyone can sign up to Behance or Dribbble at no cost, Dribbble requires you to build your portfolio and apply to display your work with a free account. The site wants to ensure that artists only post quality work, which means you’re likely to find more polished pieces when looking for inspiration.
Not requiring an application makes Behance a more inclusive and welcoming site since you can sign up at any skill level. If you’re newer to design and looking for peers to critique your work or find some encouragement, it’s a great place to start.
Dribbble is seemingly business-oriented, which, depending on your taste, isn’t a bad thing. Thanks to its exclusivity, you’ll find more clean, polished, and almost corporate-looking posts. Landing on its featured work page, you’ll notice it showcases work from individuals and companies alike.
The site offers a series of paid features which includes a marketplace that operates in partnership with Creative Market. Here, you can buy or sell digital assets. You’ll also find freelance projects exclusive to Dribbble Pro and Pro Business members, as well as paid workshops where you can brush up on your design skills.
Dribble Pro and Pro Business also come with an enhanced profile that includes Pitch video, a hire button, a custom URL, and the ability to include multiple shots of your work. You’ll also have a badge to display your Pro or Team status, which you’ll find the majority of the featured shots have—along with ads sprinkled throughout, which go away when you upgrade.
Behance feels a lot less like a marketplace and more like a space to hang out. While you won’t find a marketplace, tiered accounts, or workshops, it’s a site that centers around user-generated content and community.
You can create live streams simply by requesting access or watch others as they teach you something new for free. Another way to support fellow artists is to pay for exclusive access work they create via subscriptions, or even apply for consideration yourself.
While the featured work here isn’t as polished as what you find on Dribbble, the forgiving nature and imperfections create more variety and emotion—the kind we’d seek when walking through a traditional art gallery.
In fact, Behance encourages you to share your unfinished pieces in the form of Works in Progress. Much like a Facebook story, these disappear in 24 hours.
Behance is an excellent site for beginners and those looking for a more community-oriented environment. Dribbble is the place to be if you’re a creative professional and looking to network. If we were to compare them to other social media platforms, Behance would be like the Instagram of the design industry and Dribbble would be like LinkedIn.
Do You Need to Be a Designer to Use Behance or Dribbble?
You don’t need to be a designer to use either. Both offer accounts that you can sign up for at no cost if you’re only browsing.
It’s an excellent way to find a designer you’d like to work with or buy art from. You can also go there to simply appreciate someone’s work, much like scrolling through a digital art gallery.
Perhaps you’re simply curious about the industry and have some questions about digital art and design. If you’ve ever heard someone tell you not to reinvent the wheel, design is very much an industry where that phrase applies.
You can learn a lot from others by reading the rationales behind a project to gain insight into how the artist solved a design problem—and, of course, asking questions, as these are social sites.
Choose the Right Platform for Your Art
Both sites are great places for creatives and artists to display their work, as well as for anyone to explore and appreciate. If you’re trying to decide between one of these sites and your own website, go with both.
With a self-owned website, you’ll own a piece of internet real-estate where you can make your own rules, but sites like Behance and Dribbble already have plenty of traffic, making your work more discoverable.
