For anyone in any type of visual business, the design portfolio is one of the keys to impressing clients. You need to be able to bring up your designs at a moment’s notice and have the ability to talk people through what you are doing.

Naturally, this is something that is essential to your business and yet there are many people in the design business that don’t have the right tools to showcase their portfolios. This is problematic at a most basic level because if your design portfolio is not easily accessible to showcase what you have done, how can you impress the people who are interested in your work? Part of the way you sell yourself is preparation, which means your portfolio needs to be available and show your work in the best light.

• 17 Graphic Designer Portfolio Examples for Inspiration

People in the creative world are all about their portfolios. Even people such as website designers should have a portfolio – anyone who has a business that is based in some way, shape, or form on business needs this tool and all of its power. There are several ways you can create your design portfolio. All of these portfolios start the same way though. You will buy a domain name and design your portfolio website for your visitors to browse. When this is done right, the people who come to see your work will get a sense not just of your design skills, but of your professionalism and your commitment to doing the job right. That said, your design portfolio should not be the most impressive thing on a drab background. Make sure your portfolio website has a good design too. These little areas of attention to detail will do the job of showing prospective clients that you are up for whatever task they have for you.

Behance

There is something to be said for a platform that is hosting many people who are doing the same thing. If nothing else, it means that the platform is good. Behance is exactly that and there is a reason that more than a million creatives are trusting it. The first thing is that having your design portfolio on Behance means that people will see it. There are more than 60 million page views each month. These are monster numbers and if you just get a fraction of that, it will change your business for good. 

However, there is more to Behance than just page views. The service is so good and so effective that Adobe purchased it in 2012 and added it to their Creative Cloud service. What that means for you is using Photoshop and Illustrator are much easier and better integrated. As far as wins go for creative folks, having a partnership with Adobe is proof that Behance is a very formidable platform, and it also allows you ease of use as there is less nonsense in the exporting phase. 

The other great thing about Behance is that the service at its core is free. The Creative Cloud subscription will help take advantage of its more impressive features, while at the same time the mobile service has also taken many leaps forward. You can get an app at no cost on iOS and Android and the app does a great job syncing with your Behance even when you are offline. The bottom line is if you are in the creative field, there are few apps that do the work that Behance does, and that is why it has so many users and why its traffic is so obscenely large.

Morpholio

One of the best parts about working in the creative field is hearing the opinions of other people who share the same passion for design like you do. These people often have the best ideas and suggestions, which allow you to do a better job expressing what you do that much more. The brutal truth is that design can be a process where you are in a silo, and when you are there, it is your ideas that get primacy and the ability for other ideas to intrude is difficult. So, with that in mind, the goal is to create a portfolio allowing you to show your work while at the same time having the ability to get feedback, and that is what we have with Morpholio. 

Morpholio is a free iOS app that allows your work to get critiqued by other people in your creative community. They can leave comments on your work, sketch on images, make comments, share ideas, and so much more. You can do so much with Morpholio include just use it as a portfolio, but the bottom line is you could be missing an opportunity to get better at your craft with the help of the people who have a similar skill level as you.

Dunked

When it comes to creating things that are easy to use and ubiquitous online, WordPress is usually a good starting place and Orman Clark decided that the WordPress experience should be inserted into creating a design portfolio. The goal was creating something really easy to use and having a template that is grid-based, which allows for easier placement and editing. The good news is that Clark got it right with Dunked. The creative community has quickly warmed to it, and the level of integration Dunked has with other systems is astounding. 

In terms of integration, Dunked works with Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and SoundCloud. This system is also completely optimized for screens that have a retina display as well. You can customize this online portfolio however you see fit. There is also an option to have a customized URL as well, and you can go into the coding and edit via CSS and even with HTML too. Perhaps the only drawback is that Dunked is not a free service. There is a 10-day trial, and after that you are billed for $84 for a year’s subscription, which comes out to $7 per month.