Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Sati Taschiba

To begin with, I’d like to tell you a little bit about myself. It has been 5 years since I created my portfolio on Behance. Back in 2012, like all the newbies and probably just like you are now, I was thinking, “Oh my! I am late! This community has so many mega cool designers while I still have a way to go. I should have joined earlier.” That’s pretty much the way my first 3 years on Behance passed: I was publishing unremarkable stuff, waiting for my success and fame, but alas…
Now, having published more than 8 projects I understand what my mistakes were and what should have been done differently. With as much thought as I’ve given it, I know how to help others avoid the difficulties I encountered, and have decided to share some life hacks from my personal experience.

1. Quality

Publish only quality content. Whatever other important tips I may be giving you below, it is first and foremost that your project must be of high quality, catchy and interesting for the market, fellow designers and curators. Come up with something innovative and fresh. If you want awards, you have to spend time and effort thinking, designing, preparing and researching equivalents. DO NOT publish anything once-over- lightly or for the sake of quantity. Think about quality in the first place! It means that you will also have to give some time to presentation of your work.

For more insight you can watch this video of curators telling how they select projects for Featured. One of the things they are emphasizing here is that the project has to be well presented.

2. Size

The project has to be large, ideally 6–20 images without repetitions or 3–4 screens down. You can also provide this kind of data for the project:

Description (story behind the project, vision of the company and participants, fonts/colors/shapes/icons used and why), i.e. everything that’s part of your backstage.

Tips: If your English is not very good, or if you are not particularly good at writing, you can skip this part, but make sure you have a lot of interesting graphic material and are able to present your project well without using any text. Here is a case from my personal experience that proves it: my Warcraft
Website Concept had no description whatsoever but I got 2 Featured for it anyway. So, if you are not up to writing, just be visual, especially since people come to Behance to see the work not read a blog.

Offer large images (they have to be big and clear, ideally 1400px wide or more).
Don’t apply any watermarks or other marks to you images

3. Finish your projects

The thing is that curators of the gallery view all the works in manual way; there is no algorithm or automatized selection. As soon as you press Publish, your project is added to their list. And if at this point your project is not yet finished, then you are in trouble: no one will tag it “to be viewed later”, it
just won’t be selected for Featured.

4. Cover

Cover is the “face” of your project. It is the first thing people see about your project. So, make the cover vibrant and intriguing so that people would want to click on it and look at the rest of the project. But keep it in mind that the image on the cover has to be consistent with what’s inside — you don’t want to get anyone disappointed.

Tips:

Don’t put any text on the cover — be visual. With so many covers out there people just won’t read into it.
If you choose to use a fragment of some image on the cover, make sure you have the entire image inside the project. It may well be that this particular fragment was what caught someone’s eye and brought them to the project.

5. Choose correct category

When you publish your work there is a list of categories and you have to correctly select the area your project belongs to. This is important because it determines which curator gets to review the work and by which criteria your project will be filtered in the overall pool. Besides, it will put you onto the right list of designers in your field.

6. Join schools and organizations

In the Schools&Organizations section join as many of those as you can (wherever you fit best with your specialization). Just click Join and you will be directed to the page of the selected school or organization where you can review the membership terms and join.

I didn’t give much heed to this aspect at the beginning, but when I joined AIGA I started getting awards from the association’s gallery in a matter of weeks. And I already have 3 project awarded by AIGA!

7. Comment and like others

It is no secret that everyone enjoys having their works commented on and liked. Don’t miss the chance to get friends, followers and mentors. Use Behance as you would a social network.

Moreover, creating a lot of excitement around your project increases your chances of being noticed by the gallery’s curator.

Tips:

If you like and comment on works of newcomers, you almost always get comments and likes in return. Newcomers have relatively few notifications on Behance and they are happy to be noticed. And if you also write an appealing message telling how much you liked the work and ask them to look at your project, no one is going to refuse you.
If you like and comment on mega designers, in no way should you resort to writing the trivial “Super! See my works URL”. Google these designers first, check out the companies they are with, get a feel of their art and then write hearty and personalized messages followed by a request to see your works. If you achieve your goal and one of these mega designers likes you
or even leaves a comment, then your work will be propelled to the top in the lists of all his or her followers, and there could be millions of those. This would be a great promotion for you!

8. Write a blog

To attract more attention to your project you could blog about the idea of the project, come up with an interesting story behind it, describe the process of making it and talk about all the difficulties or inspirations and encouragements that you encountered along the way. Just like Anton Repponen did in his blog on Medium.
If you have no soft spot for writing, you can pull a trump card by writing an email to a popular design media and asking them to make a story about your project. For example, a story about my Wundernote project was published by designideas.pics.

Let`s be friends!

Sati Taschiba — Digital product designer with passion to design. Focussing on web and mobile apps. Previously worked in Wargaming. In dreams to make VR and Games. Currently lovely wife and mom 🙂

Dribbble, Behance, Instagram, Email

© Icons created by Trident, Adrien Coquet, Mitchell Eva, Barracuda, Magicon from the Noun Project.

7 Life Hacks on How to Improve Your
Portfolio and Get “Featured” on
Behance was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

7 Life Hacks on How to Improve Your Portfolio and Get “Featured” on Behance

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