Marketing Yourself: What tools to use
So you have just graduated from school and want to get your name out in the design community? Even if you have been a designer and just want to get your name out there, here are some website and tips on what to do to become more well known.
Tips
#1: Practice with Tutorials
This isn’t so much a way to promote yourself. But people won’t notice your work if it isn’t very good, overdone or old. You can always become a better designer by continuing to practice your craft and trying new things. When I finished college, I knew what everything did in Photoshop for the most part, but I didn’t know much about how to create photo manipulations or creating 3D text, or being really creative with it. This is how I got into creating tutorials, I wanted to learn how to create new things. The important thing about being a designer is continuing to hone your skills and trying new things.
Some websites to look at tutorials are PSD Tuts+, Design Instruct, Tutorial9, among others, and of course we have tutorials here at Denis Designs.
#2: Keep Designing
Just because you design one awesome design, doesn’t mean people are going to start flocking to you. You need to continue designing and create your own style(s). The more designs you make the more people will see, but don’t replace quantity for quality. Make the work you put online count so people remember your work.
#3: Write a tutorial
If you feel comfortable about your design and writing skills and skills in different programs, try writing some tutorials. This will get your work out there, and it will help you reach out to the design community and make you a better designer. Most websites will also add a link to your website, portfolios or anything else you want.
If you have a website you can put tutorials on there (or if you have a blog), or you can send a preview of the work to pretty much any tutorial website to see if they will accept it.
Promote yourself with online portfolios
Promoting yourself on many websites is a great way to spread your work out so more people see it. Even if you have created your own website (which is recommended) you want to get as many people to see your work, starting with these websites.
Deviant Art
Deviant Art is an online gallery of artwork created by Scott Jarkoff, Matthew Stephens, and Angelo Sotira launched August of 2000. Anyone can sign up for a free account and put their work up online. You can promote all kinds of artwork by sharing it with other artists or sell prints and other products with your design on it.
Behance Network
Behance is another online gallery/portfolio site that lets you customize different pages of your portfolio, displaying images in groups, or by themselves. Since you need to apply to be accepted to Behance, your work will be presented in a professional manner along with other professionals.
Flickr
Flickr is a place designed to share your photos, but you can also put up your designs. Signing up is free, and because of the popularity and high volume that Flickr gets, your work has a real good chance of being looked at. You can also join groups of like-minded individuals to get your work seen even more. Like Deviant Art, you can take your images and create different products with them.
There are many other websites like Carbonmade, but these are the main ones that you will get the most traffic from.
Promote your portfolio and designs on social sites
Having a portfolio and having a place to show off your work is great, but you need to get people to see what you have done. Social sites are one way to promote your work.
Twitter isn’t just a site to tell the world what you had for breakfast, or your latest random thought. Although this is how it started out, twitter has become a way to get news, hear about the latest and greatest thing. You can share links from you twitter account about your work or your portfolio, connect with other designers, and see other peoples work and design related news.
Founded by Mark Zuckerberg, this website originally was created so that college students could connect to each other, but has become a social media hub for anyone who want to join (for free). You can connect to other designers by city, workplace, school, and region to show off your work and share your work with others.
Linkedin was founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 by Reid Hoffman. This site is more of a business-oriented social networking site where people can post their résumé, with their past and previous work, as well as their websites/portfolios. People can connect to others in their field, clients, potential clients, employers and employees. Employers can list jobs and search for potential employees, and users can search for jobs, people and businesses. Since it is free to sign up, it can’t hurt to get your name out for potential clients/employers.
Promotional websites
Digg
To sum it up, Digg is a place for people to share all kinds of information from anywhere on the Internet. Digg was launched in December of 2004, as an experiment in November of 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Rob Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. Users can submit links and stories and comment and vote on others links and stories. If you submit an article/image/video and it gets enough “digs” (votes) it can get put on the front page for everyone to see.
Design Float
Design Float is like Digg for designers. It is a place for people to share information on design from all over the Internet in the form of links and articles. You can vote up different articles and the most popular ones will go to the front page. A similar website is Design Bump that is for designers and you can also vote up web pages.
Delicious
Delicious is a site where users can bookmark sites that are interesting to them and share them with other people and view sites that others have bookmarked. The most bookmarked sites can be viewed on the Delicious home page.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a website where you can “like” a website to give it more popularity. There is a Firefox add-on for where you can add a bar to your browser to like pages, share with people you are connected to, or stumble onto something new. If you put
something up that a lot of people like, it has to opportunity to get onto a lot of people screens through stumble.
These are a few basic ways to get your work seen by the design community, and to get your name out there. There are all kinds of websites and place to go to do this, but I have found these are some of the important places to go to get started.
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