Your portfolio is your reflection to the world of your standing and quality as a designer. Creating and maintaining a good portfolio is only half the job done. So much of being a creative professional is sharing your portfolio far and wide; whether it’s to land that new job, to bag a lucrative freelance project, or just simply to share it with peers to let them know what you’ve been up to.
Constantly publishing and sharing work over great design platforms such as Behance, Dribbble, IndieFolio and social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram is going to significantly improve your chances of being discovered. But to eventually bag a project or reach out to that recruiter or founder of your dream company, an e-mail remains the way to go. However, sharing links over an e-mail can be a drag, there’s so little you can convey at first glance through blue underlined text. There had to be a better manner to share such incredible work, both visually and functionally.
In my experience at IndieFolio, I’ve had the unique opportunity to connect with a large cross-section of creators. And that’s where the inspiration to create a plugin made specifically to beautifully share portfolios over e-mail came from. 60% of the designers we surveyed believed that portfolio sharing over e-mail could be made a lot better. (Full disclosure of the survey made at the bottom of the article)
Empowered by our findings we pushed ahead and created Insert by IndieFolio, a plugin that embeds a fully customisable HTML layout of your portfolio directly into your e-mail body. Insert is a whole new way of sharing portfolios over email and gives you the power to choose which projects do you want your recipient to view. With Insert you can customize the layout of your email and even choose to include a small description of yourself, your experience and your skills in the email body itself. Given that Gmail & Chrome remain market share leaders in e-mailing and browser usage, a Chrome Plugin seemed the obvious way to initiate this concept.
We have been testing this plugin over the past few months with select IndieFolio users and believe now is the perfect time to give it a widespread launch and enable creators across the world reap benefits of this product. We have also ensured that it is compatible and fully functional with the newly redesigned Gmail. We believe that Insert has applications across all walks of any creative professional’s life span, be it personal, academic or professional. Here are a couple of interesting use cases we’ve come across since we began testing the plugin:
- Creative professionals tend to be multi-talented people, in my experience. Especially while vying for a specific freelance project, you’d like to highlight a specific skill. With Insert, you can highlight the projects you want and leave out the rest.
- It is essential to keep your portfolio updated to showcase your most relevant work and to weed out projects that either confuse your audience or showcase some past deficiencies. Inspite of that, one will notice that very few creatives actually take time out to delete projects that are no longer relevant to your current standing or expertise. With Insert, one can ensure that only the most updated and relevant projects are showcased to the recipient
You can now download the Insert plugin for yourself here: https://goo.gl/ArDEcU
Any feedback will be appreciated and can be emailed to me on shashank@indiefolio.com. We are also always striving to create newer and better solutions and products for creative folks. If you believe you have a problem or an idea, do get in touch.
PS: As mentioned previously, here are the findings from the survey:
- A total of 233 designers from all over India participated in this activity.
- 83.7% of the respondents always used Chrome & Gmail for any sort of online activity.
- They mostly shared portfolios for:
- Freelance Proposals (41.6%)
- Job Opportunities (40.8%)
- Reviews by Friends, Family & Experts (12.4%)
- 59.6% of the respondents felt that there was a 100% need to improve portfolio sharing over email whereas 13.3% believed that their needs were satisfied and didn’t need any new features.
- 60.5% of the respondents wanted to see a product like Insert in the market, whereas 12.8% said they would never use such a feature.
If you want to make your opinions heard as well, do fill up the following survey and we will update the results regularly: https://goo.gl/forms/qtG7Z83ccPa8XJCU2.
