I Need an Online Portfolio

miladyderyni_173d399f47

I've decided to try my hand at art for RPGs or book covers and need an online portfolio. Where do I start? Can I use my gallery at Renderosity? Are the sites offering free portfolio hosting acceptable? 

jmucchiello

You should go to places like RPG.NET or ENWORLD.ORG where RPG makers hang out and asking there where they look for portfolios online. Both of those sites have subforums where people can commission works and can advertise availability for commissions specific to RPGs. (My RPG making days are long past.) 

And, from my old experience, word of mouth is more powerful than a portfolio because word of mouth puts eyes on your portfolio and it tells the potential art director you have met deadlines (otherwise there's no word of mouth, of course).

miladyderyni_173d399f47

jmucchiello said:

You should go to places like RPG.NET or ENWORLD.ORG where RPG makers hang out and asking there where they look for portfolios online. Both of those sites have subforums where people can commission works and can advertise availability for commissions specific to RPGs. (My RPG making days are long past.) 

And, from my old experience, word of mouth is more powerful than a portfolio because word of mouth puts eyes on your portfolio and it tells the potential art director you have met deadlines (otherwise there's no word of mouth, of course).

I do know some people in the field. However one of the companies I am interested in requires a link to an online portfolio in the cover letter. 

davidwski_16294691f0

One of these might work. from chatgpt

Yes. If you mainly want somewhere to post examples of your work and send people a link, there are several good free options. Free plans commonly give you a platform URL rather than your own domain.

Site	Good for	Free?	Difficulty
Behance	Graphic design, illustration, photography, creative projects	✅	Very easy
Carrd	Simple one-page professional portfolio	✅	Very easy
Canva Websites	Visual portfolios, presentations, design work	✅	Very easy
Google Sites	Straightforward portfolio with multiple pages	✅	Very easy
Notion	Writing, projects, case studies, mixed work	✅	Easy
Wix	More traditional portfolio website	✅ with limitations	Easy
GitHub Pages	Coding, technical projects, custom sites	✅	More technical

For creative examples, I'd start with Behance. For a portfolio that feels more like your own little website, Carrd is particularly good for a clean one-page presentation, while Google Sites is useful if you want several pages and don't care as much about sophisticated design.

If you tell me what kind of examples you're posting (writing, graphic design, photography, marketing, work samples, school projects, etc.), I can narrow this down to the 2–3 that fit best.

Choose the best fit for your work

Gordig

Leave it to an AI to suggest GitHub for an artistic project.

jmucchiello

miladyderyni_173d399f47 said:

jmucchiello said:

You should go to places like RPG.NET or ENWORLD.ORG where RPG makers hang out and asking there where they look for portfolios online. Both of those sites have subforums where people can commission works and can advertise availability for commissions specific to RPGs. (My RPG making days are long past.) 

And, from my old experience, word of mouth is more powerful than a portfolio because word of mouth puts eyes on your portfolio and it tells the potential art director you have met deadlines (otherwise there's no word of mouth, of course).

I do know some people in the field. However one of the companies I am interested in requires a link to an online portfolio in the cover letter. 

I meant ask where to put a portfolio on those forums and they might say things like "I usually go to abc.com when looking for a new artist." I doubt renderosity, for example, is frequented by folks buying RPG art.

miladyderyni_173d399f47

Thanks all for being willing to help. Some general clarifications:

This would be an art portfolio, no AI. I wouldn't be putting it up hoping people would come looking for artists. Rather, a site/link to give out when requested.

I am also doing writing and editing too, but I've not been asked for samples/portfolio and already have side job experience in those.

None of my industry contacts are artists. They are writers, editors, and game developers.

Torquinox

You still want something that observes basic protocol for a nice, clean, professional online portfolio. https://www.portfoliobox.com/art/free looks promising. Well, you can search free online art portfolio and get the same answers I did. There are a number of solutions.

kpr

miladyderyni_173d399f47 said:

...

None of my industry contacts are artists. They are writers, editors, and game developers.

If you want to look a bit 'pro' it helps to use something you can point a domain at (and also buy one of those to suit your fancy... a .info is usually quite cheap, as are other applicables from the newer varieties, like bio and pro)

https://portfolio.adobe.com/ lets you do that - has a shedload of templates - and makes your profile feel 'part of a creative group'

Guide on Behance : https://www.behance.net/gallery/48523635/Using-a-Custom-Domain-Name-in-Adobe-Portfolio

NB: No affiliations or wotnot, just know a few folk who have done same 

donniekeidic

You could always combine a free static Cloudflare front page to act as your portfolio, along with Archive.org to host the pictures, animations, music, what have you. Then embed those links on your cloudflare page. You would have free unlimited storage and bandwidth with this option and you would be in total control which is rare when looking for free options. I'm leaning towards this option myself, but haven't fully implemented it yet. And making the cloudflare static page is really easy with something like Publii which I recommend if you have no web experience. 

donniekeidic

a lilttle more info on it via AI summary...

Yeah, that's a solid free combo. Here's how it works together:

• Cloudflare Pages hosts your site's HTML/CSS/JS — the structure, layout, and navigation.

• Archive.org hosts the heavy media (videos, audio, images, documents) that you embed or link to from your site. They explicitly allow embedding their files on your own site.

A few things to keep in mind with archive.org:

• Content must be non-commercial and licensed under a Creative Commons license* (or public domain). For a personal portfolio of your own work, this is usually a non-issue — you just pick a CC license when you upload.

• Everything is public. There's no private storage — your uploads are visible to anyone.

• No hard storage cap, but they recommend staying under 1,000 files / 500 GB per item and 5,000 files per day for uploads. For a portfolio you'll be nowhere near those limits.

• Unlimited bandwidth for serving your files.

The main tradeoff is that archive.org's player/embed UI is a bit dated compared to, say, YouTube or Vimeo — but for a portfolio where you just need reliable, free, long-term hosting of your own media, it works fine. You can also just hotlink the raw file URLs directly in your Cloudflare Pages site if you want full control over the presentation.

*Regarding the licensing, if you choose CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives when you upload to archive.org, Reusers can only share the original, unmodified work for non-commercial purposes. No remixing, no edits, no translations — just redistribution as-is with credit. You will retain the right to change to commercial usage later if you want. You will retain the copyright. So you could upload the low-res version to archive.org for your free portfolio as CC-BY-NC-ND, and later sell the 4K version commercially hosted somewhere else of course, if you become a viral hit for example and want to start doing Patreon in the future.

lilweep

Do you actually want people to find your work? Then use Instagram and post constantly and follow lots of other creators in your space.

Do you simply want to host your work somewhere professional, maybe dont overthink it and make a free Artstation account.  I wouldnt advise to make a Deviantart account if you want to be giving it out to people, as Deviantart has a reputation of being full of weird stuff these days.

You can also make custom webpages easily (with Notion, Canva, Wix, etc like the AI suggested) but may be more effort than it is worth at this level of your enterprise.  The portfoliobox one that was suggested earlier or some other specifically portfolio-oriented template could be useful as that may be less effort than making your own.

lilweep

Also more broadly can we please stop copy-pasting unsummarised AI garbage as a stand-in for actual knowledge dissemination and conversation?  

davidwski_16294691f0

lilweep said:

Also more broadly can we please stop copy-pasting unsummarised AI garbage as a stand-in for actual knowledge dissemination and conversation?  

It was offered as a starting point if the OP felt it useful. Apologize to anyone feeling triggered by the post. 

Torquinox

lilweep said:

Do you actually want people to find your work? Then use Instagram and post constantly and follow lots of other creators in your space.

Do you simply want to host your work somewhere professional, maybe dont overthink it and make a free Artstation account.  I wouldnt advise to make a Deviantart account if you want to be giving it out to people, as Deviantart has a reputation of being full of weird stuff these days.

You can also make custom webpages easily (with Notion, Canva, Wix, etc like the AI suggested) but may be more effort than it is worth at this level of your enterprise.  The portfoliobox one that was suggested earlier or some other specifically portfolio-oriented template could be useful as that may be less effort than making your own.

The OP is looking for a crisp, professional portfolio to send prospective clients when applying for freelance work, and portfoliobox looked pretty good to me.  The problem with making a website, any website, is that it's a mouth to feed. Even a paid thing does not guarantee the owner will keep feeding it. I believe something simple is best for most people. As we're discussing a portfolio without expectations for traffic (by invitation only, really), simple and free are ideal. Eventually, it might make sense to pay for a domain name and plug that into the equation, but that's only if the venture takes off or if one wants a specific domain name.

Andrew_C

Any particular reason why you cant use ArtStation? Its kinda like a much more professional version of DA, with the added bonus of not having a stupid name or a reputation for wierdness.

miladyderyni_173d399f47

@Torquinox & lilweep Yes, a professional portfolio that is more or less invitation only is what I had in mind. Simple is always best for me.

@Andrew_C Deviant Art's, um, interesting reputation is why I didn't even consider it, although I have an account there. I was briefly thinking about my Rendo gallery, but I couldn't figure out how to make just a selection available. You can have albums but I couldn't make one. You have to have an image of a certain size designated as a thumbnail, but every time I submitted one resized properly the site kept telling me it was the wrong size. Go figure.

I had not realized ArtStation could be used as an online portfolio, so I will check it out.