Portfolio / Book website?

[Antoine.L]

Hello guild members, and happy new year.

I come to you because I'm thinking about create an online book/portfolio to be able to show my creations in somewhere else than instagram.

Wich way could be a good one with your experiences?

I thought about something like devianart? or an other one in this style?
Or maybe it is better to create my own website using a wordpress or whatever platform?

Or maybe something else which I don't know yet?

I apologize if this thread already exist, but I thing this kind of thing evolve every year and can be update anyway.


I'll be very pleased if you could help me on this to chooice between severals choices we have, to show off our stuff on internet.

Colored cheers,

[Redrobes]

Your own website is great and gives you total control but is a lot of hassle to maintain. Also, you do need a good ISP which will give you rapid page load times and you need to get people to link to it a lot in order to get good google rankings for ad hoc people visiting. But if you wanted to just tell people the URL / domain name then that would work ok.

Deviant art is a similar thing but done for you and will give you the album with google scanning it for you and it ought to be fast.

Or you can use your members album here which is the same kind of thing and that will get picked up by google as part of the usual guild scanning that they do.

So unless you want something specific then I would suggest putting your art in your album here and then you can tell people about that. If its on here then it needs to be maps or fantasy art or similar and small quantities of non map stuff but reams of non map related non fantasy / sci fi stuff might get frowned upon whereas on Deviant art I think any art is all good. But if your portfolio is fantasy / scifi / map related then your ok to use our forum album facility.

Oh - also, keep checking out the site usage licensing etc. On the guild here your art is your own and with an exception that the guild may occasionally post promotional posts containing members art, we dont own, sell or otherwise give it out. Probably true for Deviant art as well but less so for Facebook and the other cronies.

Our terms of use: https://www.cartographersguild.com/m...ate=TermsOfUse
See "User submissions" which is very much in the members best interests.

[Tiana]

There's nowhere on the internet you'll get better engagement than what you're already seeing on Instagram. Mirroring to dozens of sites isn't worth it. Do a DeviantArt, but you'll be lucky to get a couple of likes. Do an ArtStation and the same thing will happen. Instagram is a high traffic area, so if you're hoping to get more eyes, you'll be very disappointed by the results. You'll get better results by pouring effort into any one place than spreading out and diversifying. Honestly, THIS website is the #1 cartography hub, it's not a bad idea to make a portfolio HERE with the gallery option if your art is just map related. If you want to do book related posts as it sounds, your own blog would be ideal as there are no limits on what you can do with your own site. Costs money but worth it in the long run.

[Falconius]

Instagram, as terrible and awful and invasive as it is, is probably the best option ATM. Artstation works much better for a portfolio though and is just a nicer site, there is not much audience engagemnt really and there is the double edged sword of it only being filled with finished work and highly polished work for the most part. Artstation does have a blogging section for people but it's kind of shunted out of the way and I don't see much engagement on it for those who use it. Deviant Art switched to a new awful format and I've stopped visiting it more than once a month or every two months and they lost a lot of artists who got fed up with them.

[ChickPea]

If all you want to do is show off your creations, then yeah, Instagram. There's also Dribbble and Behance. Or, of course, our beloved Guild!

If you want to do commissions and have a professional portfolio to show clients, I would strongly recommend getting your own website. I believe that any pro/semi-pro content creator should have their own website so that you always have a place for your work that YOU control. You never know when a social media site will change their terms, close down, fade away etc. Flickr used to be THE site for photographers, but it lost its lead several years back, and I believe is dying a slow death now. If you put all your eggs in (for example) the Instagram basket, where does that leave you if the site loses its popularity, or changes its terms in a way you don't like? If you become dissatisfied with a site, you have to start all over again building a new following at whatever the hottest new site is.

Many artists post to multiple places because the more you get your name out there, the higher your profile will be. This also gives a degree of protection if any one of these sites disappears. It's a hassle, I'm sure, to keep on top of everything, but - if you're a pro - I guess it's part of your job. (None of this is particularly relevant if you're not taking the pro route, and only want to share your work to interested followers - any of the sites named in the replies would probably be good enough.)

[Antoine.L]

Thank you for your answers. I'm looking more for something to show off to my family and friends who do not have IG, without any purposes to get engagements or more visibility. Like you all said, Instagram is the best place for that.

I thing I'll go with the guild gallery first, or maybe an Artstation after a test.

If you want to do commissions and have a professional portfolio to show clients, I would strongly recommend getting your own website. I believe that any pro/semi-pro content creator should have their own website so that you always have a place for your work that YOU control. You never know when a social media site will change their terms, close down, fade away etc. Flickr used to be THE site for photographers, but it lost its lead several years back, and I believe is dying a slow death now. If you put all your eggs in (for example) the Instagram basket, where does that leave you if the site loses its popularity, or changes its terms in a way you don't like? If you become dissatisfied with a site, you have to start all over again building a new following at whatever the hottest new site is.

I'm not at this level yet, and the few commisions I get make me happy enough, but thank you for the advise, who knows what future will be.

[Tiana]

Deviant Art switched to a new awful format and I've stopped visiting it more than once a month or every two months and they lost a lot of artists who got fed up with them.

Amen. It's dying. Forcing Eclipse on everyone at the cost of several old features was certainly one nail in the coffin.

I don't use IG myself, but you don't need to use it to look at someone's art with it, and your engagement far surpasses what I could get with a year of work on Artstation. That said, Artstation has a good professional userbase, and it's probably the best 'free portfolio' right now. I do wish it had DeviantArt's level of blogging/comment on portfolio type of features, it's actually a real pain to go and like a bunch of art or browse through what your list of watched people made to leave a bunch of comments though, that's why I think engagement is low compared to IG users.

[eepjr24]

If you have a story to tell in addition to the maps and such, WorldAtlas might be okay for you (the free version). The main drawback of the free version is that nothing can be private, but that might suit your needs fine. I am not a fan of their paid model, but to make an interactive walk through of a world or the like they are pretty easy to use for someone you just wanted to show your work to.

- E

[J.Edward]

Each platform has it's ups and downs.
Your benefit from them might depend more on what you were trying to get from them.
Tiana is absolutely right about DA. They are killing themselves. Or, to be more accurate, Wix, who bought them a few years back, is killing the old DA.
I was a paid member for years, and just stopped. I used to get a lot of activity, engagement, and comms from there. But it's on its last leg.

Artstation is great for commercial work, as that was and is the primary audience. I get a lot of work from there.
Twitter, oddly, has proved rather nice for me. Better results than I was able to get with IG and FB.
Everyone's results will vary. Others on IG, from the Guild, who started at the same time, or after me, have dramatically eclipsed my results there.

The audiences on each platform are different, and you need to know who your audience is so you can be more effective in reaching and communicating with them.
IG is not my place. I loathe having to do everything from my phone, and so do it less and less. They have so many seen and unseen restrictions.

Worldanvil looks so good for crafting a story with images, but you may have to drive an audience to your worldanvil site, which is far harder than catching the roaming eyes of someone already on a larger platform, like social media.
I've wanted to do similar to what it sounds like you want to do. I tried a blog but was too inconsistent. I thought worldanvil would be the thing, and it might, I haven't been able to get myself going on a new platform yet.
Too many projects and not enough time.

[Antoine.L]

Well thank you for all these answers, the guild support is always amazing.

I will give a try to artstation as is sound like the most polyvalent alternative to Instagram.
I don't think I would do my own website if it's not for a semi-pro/pro activity, and it is not the purpose yet.