Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Designer Layla Keramat
keeps her extensive
collection of photographic
works on Flickr to
distinguish it from her
professional design work.
Other sites serve their own niches. Issuu (issuu.com) is a publishing outlet for
everything from magazines to comic topics, but it has an impressive collection of
topics of personal art as well as online versions of printed portfolios. Best of all, it
adds the feeling of a real publication to each PDF document by using software to
provide shadows and highlights to what looks like photos of a bound book. This
makes it a powerful option for graphic designers as well as architectural and industrial
designers who are required to own a formal printed portfolio as students. The down-
side of such a big site is that your work could get lost on it. Issuu, like others in its
category, makes money by offering a premium publishing level that features you
prominently and eliminates their advertising and logo from your work.
Creative services portfolio site
Like discounters where you can sometimes find a designer gem, free-for-all
self-publishing sites can be exciting and entertaining addresses. However, they encom-
pass enormous ranges in quality. And even with a superior search function, they offer
a daunting number of results in any category. You have no control over the context of
your work, and there is no curator to exercise quality control. If a search turns up
twenty results and the first five are mediocre, the searcher might not bother to look at
number six—aka you.
