14 DAY TRIAL // The biggest online art community, DevianArt, has launched a unique service called "DaPortfolio," which allows its users to build graphics portfolios using a standard Web template. The service is available in two forms, free, for regular users, and in a Premium version, for its paying clients.
DeviantArt offers hosting services to a complete set of art forms like digital graphics, poetry, prose, print and photography. Because of the way it's built, this service will only be useful for graphics portfolios, to photographers and people working with prints.
The cool thing about the release is the fact that a nice, clean portfolio can be built in a couple of minutes from a very easy interface. To benefit from "DaPortfolio," one has to be registered on DeviantArt. The registration is free, by the way, even if you are not an artist.
The service provides hosting for the submitted artwork, a custom domain name (member_name.daportfolio.com), the possibility to organize art into folders, the ability to import photos from DevianArt galleries directly to the portfolio, and the option to add a resume, so visitors can download it.
A great feature of the whole service is the fact that old users will be able to maintain their regular DevianArt id. Also the older version, simply called "Portfolio," will be still available for the next two months, a period during which users will be encouraged to migrate all the work to the new platform.
For those who want to post a few words about themselves, DaPortfolio provides a biography section. If that space is not big enough for weathered veterans with a little bit more to show off, an external resume can be uploaded and hosted for them on the server. In this way, if someone will be interested in it, it can be downloaded from the biography section. The .doc, .docx, .rtf and .pdf formats are currently supported.
When accessing a gallery, a visitor can select the artwork that they would like to view from a list of thumbnails. After selecting a photo, if they want to inspect it closer, they can click on the big image and a previewer with navigational arrows will enlarge it up to 1,200 pixels in width.
The free membership will allow users to host up to four galleries, with a maximum of 18 images per gallery. If the designer wants to rotate the images on the front page of the portfolio, they can upload up to 100 images that will be hosted for free on DevianArt. The pictures can be switched on/off from the portfolio back-end. Regular users also have access to a custom domain name and have no ads displayed on the page.
For the paying members, extra domain names are available to choose from. Besides daportfolio.com, artworkfolio.com, cleanfolio.com and designbinder.com are available, or they can even use a personal domain or sub-domain name like designer_name.com / subdomain.designer_name.com. A customized logo can be employed in the Premium version, while the DevianArt logo can also be removed from the bottom-left corner. For premium users that don't want copycats snooping around their portfolio, a password-protection system is available.
One of DaPortfolio's downsides is the fact that photos under 400*400 pixels will be automatically rejected, the user having to resize them manually. Additionally, Web-designers or people that have HTML & CSS knowledge won't have access to the page's source code, so the look for now will be kind of blunt and regular. This may be a major downside for expert designers that would want to impress their customers, the current styling on the portfolio not being that up-to-date with modern trends.
The release seems to be catching pretty well around the design community, especially for those who hated the old DevianArt gallery format or just didn't have the knowledge to build a web portfolio. New features and some fixes are to be expected in the coming future.
