Pheromonic

If you are a photographer, creating a portfolio is certainly one of the most important things you need to do. There are a number of benefits that a portfolio can bring you: it helps you showcase your work online, pulls in new clients and builds a strong and wide online exposure for your work.

The sad thing is that, not all photographers possess technical skills for building a portfolio. Some may feel a little intimidated due to lack of coding skills and the others may think that building a portfolio needs a lot of time as to them, it’s an intricate process to go through.

The good news is that there are a number of platforms for you to build an online portfolio for your work without wasting your precious time and with no coding skills required.

Here is a list of the top 10 portfolio-building websites for photography lovers, in random order.

Recommended Reading: 10 Free Online Tools To Create Professional Resumes

1. Photoshelter

Photoshelter is one of the most popular platforms for building photography websites and online portfolios. The site allows you to control the layouts, fonts and images of your portfolio with ease and mobility.

The bottom line is that it doesn’t require any coding. Photoshelter doesn’t only provide you with tools to showcase your work; it also attracts buyers to purchase your photos. Its integration with social media sites and SEO turns your photo business strong and solid.

2. Orosso

Orosso is a portfolio building tool that allows its members to build professional and smart portfolios and maintain them easily. It doesn’t take much time to build a photography portfolio website. With Orosso, the process turns out easier and simplistic. In a matter of minutes you can have your portfolio created in a flash and highly customizable towards your looks and requirement.

Artists, designers and architects may consider Orosso as a viable option to create portfolios for a strong online presence. You can try it for 14 days and decide whether it’s worth a pay or not.

3. Foliolink

Foliolink is an online portfolio-building tool specifically for photographers and artists who want to build professional portfolios and sell their work online effortlessly. It doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML or CSS coding to get the portfolio created.

Foliolink features iPad and iPhone shadow sites, customization and e-commerce tools, and Search Engine Optimization for your online portfolio. You can create a free 7-days account before deciding what plan suits you best.

4. Zenfolio

Zenfolio is an online tool that helps you make amazing online portfolios fast and painlessly. Whether you are photographer looking for building a stunning portfolio or a photographer serious about selling your work online, Zenfolio is the right choice for you.

The user-friendly ecommerce interface, point-and-click interface and easy customizers are the features that can make you complete your photography website in a flash. The subscription fee starts at $30 per year. However, they provide a free premium account for trial (there is nothing to lose).

5. FolioHD

FolioHD is a self-hosted portfolio platform for photographers, artists, architects, models and designers. They offer essential features to build a website in a simple way and according to the plan you register for. In folioHD there are 3 plans: basic, power and pro. The basic only supports up to 36 uploads of media files, but the plan is free.

On the other hand, the power and pro plans provide more exciting features such as, Google Analytics, privacy options and the Fotomoto access. The power and pro plans only differ in the amount of uploads, which is 1000 and 2000, respectively.

6. Folio Websites

Folio Websites is a portfolio building website for creating mobile and professional photography websites. What makes Folio Websites stand out from the overcrowded marketplace, is their clean, simple and clutter-free design.

They work on WordPress, which is highly customizable, offers SEO benefits for better search ranking and mobile compatibility. You can register a premium account starting at $14.60 per month.

7. 1X

1X is more of a social network and online community for photographers than a portfolio building tool. However, photographers can use this platform to get strong exposure with thousands of users in this community.

The interesting thing about 1X is that, not every photo you upload is going to be published. Every photo you submit is selected for publication by a curator. 1X has a forum community where professional designers discuss the projects they are working on and give suggestions for a better craft. You can give it a go for free.

8. 500px

500px is a personalized portfolio building tool and market platform for photographers to sell their work. This platform helps photographers to create online portfolios easily.

In 500px, you maintain and control your site whenever you need and without having to touch any code. They provide their members with great features, such as, advanced tracking system of visitors, unlimited photos upload, custom domain name and a photo store that allows selling of photos online.

9. SmugMug

SmugMug is a platform for digital photo sharing where photographers can expose the masterpiece of their work to a community of thousands of members. SmugMug provides the users with beautiful and elegant themes to build professional portfolios that spark interests.

The portfolio building interface is simple to work on, with easy customizers to select photos, fonts, colors and themes. For wider exposure, share your work on Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks.

10. Pixpa

Pixpa is a portfolio building site that allows photographers to create amazing and elegant portfolios to show off their works. It provides you with hundreds of pre-designed templates to choose and you can select the one that best fits your needs in just a single click. Customizable fonts, backgrounds, colors, menus are among a plethora of features to build your site with ease.

If you are craving for your own domain name to build a strong online presence, Pixpa also supports that. In Pixpa you can also sell your photos online using an e-commerce integrated platform called Fotomoto. Give it a try for 15 days (no credit card required).

To all web developers and designers, there are various resources that they can use while establishing a new website. One of which is frameworks, defined as a universal or regulated array of criteria, concepts, and practices to address

Part of my job is consulting with web designers to help them make more money. I get to hear about a lot of pain within the web design community. It never fails. The #1 painful comment that I hear more than anything else is “we can’t get paid what we are worth.” Do you have [...]

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You're reading Double the Price of your Next Web Design Project, originally posted on Designmodo - UI Kits. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+!

Least.js creates random and responsive HTML5 and CSS3 image galleries that include Lazyload. Installation and usage is simple, and the end result is quite beautiful.

It is that time of the week again, a chance for you to sit back and enjoy some of our favorite web and mobile designs from this past week. And of course, don’t forget to click the ‘Change Viewport’ button to explore each site in detail.

Roynel.co

Roynel.co →

WNDRMNT (Responsive)

WNDRMNT →Change Viewport

ZURB (Responsive)

ZURB →Change Viewport

Hyperkit (Responsive)

Hyperkit →Change Viewport

Profission

Profission →

#Music.Twitter (Responsive)

#Music.Twitter →Change Viewport

Yahoo! Weather (iOS App)

Yahoo! Weather →

Hike (iOS, Android & Windows Mobile App)

Hike →

Merel Karhof has been using the breeze as muse for years, finding new ways to spin airflow into creative gold. Most notable, perhaps, is the London-based designer’s Wind Knitting Machine, which united a metal mill and loom to make one-of-a-kind scarves. Her ongoing Energy Harvesters series (I, II, III, and IV) underscores her continued fascination with the invisible force. And her latest project, a furniture collection, is not only ingenious but it’s the most ambitious yet.

Karhof sited the project in the historic Zaanse Schans region of the Netherlands, an industrial milling hub dating back almost 300 years. These days, it provides a stark glimpse back at the traditions that helped establish the region. On-site, Karhos harnessed whooshing gales and used original, still-functioning machinery in a three-fold process to make the furniture: a sawmill cut the wood that provided the structure for each piece, a color mill ground the pigment used to dye the yarn, and Karhof’s own knitting machine transformed those colored fibers into mini pillows to upholster the stools, benches, and seats. And much like she did with the scarves, whose length corresponded to time it took to make, each cushion is sized relative to how long it took to produce.

The concept alone is enough to make this one of the coolest design endeavors in a while, not to mention a thoughtful approach to sustainability. But the pieces are, frankly, quite fine looking. They have nicely minimalist forms and soft hues. We hope she’ll make more soon.

Rich Brilliant Willing was formed in 2007 with the goal of uniting the oft disparate worlds of design and manufacturing from a fully equipped, Brooklyn-based studio and workshop. In the following six years, RBW’s founding trio of RISD grads--Charles Brill, Theo Richardson, and Alex Williams--have produced thoughtful lighting and furniture that have established their reputation as a design force.

“A design is a concept,” Brill explains in the first of our Making It video series. “There’s a series of problems or issues that we resolve into a finished product.” As technological advancements continue to evolve the relationship designers have with their finished collections, RBW remains committed to keeping hands-on from start to finish. Getting the inner workings--or “guts”--of a particular piece isn’t exactly as glamorous as refining the aesthetics and sculptural exterior, but it offers them the opportunity to develop both aspects concurrently.

Sketching, drawing, and model-making exist at the heart of their exploratory approach, which often begins without any clear concept of where it will end up--which is actually all part of the plan, and one of the main freedoms afforded by keeping all aspects of their operation in-house. “Nothing that can substitute working with your hands. It’s rewarding to hold something physical in the increasingly digital age,” Williams says.

Ultimately, whether they’re manipulating oak and steel, stone and aluminum, or natural glass, casting off superfluous elements and keeping things minimal is always the main tenet. “We try to focus on simplicity and excellent execution into an expressive statement that you immediately understand,” Richardson says.

Check out Brill, Richardson, and Williams having a dialogue with new ideas, manipulating materials, and how what they do is like making music. And keep an eye out on Making It for more from our favorite up-and-coming creatives, who will offer a glimpse behind the scenes of their own processes.

Ugh. Just when you kinda sorta started to get a handle on the wide world of wine, along comes another new liquid metric for how cosmopolitan you really are (or aren’t): coffee. The variety is daunting. The differences are minute. This graphic should at least help with one subsection of the catalog.

Exceptional Expressions of Espresso, the latest from Pop Chart Lab, is a lovely visual guide to 23 espresso drinks, or, in their words, "a world tour of the purest form of coffee." Feel free to borrow that description the next time you’re on a coffee date.

The chart, created in collaboration with Orbit Visual Graphic Design, covers the big names--the lattes and the macchiatos--as well as lesser-known varieties, like the Galão (30 mL espresso, 90 mL foamed milk) and the Café Bombón (60 mL espresso, 60 mL sweetened, condensed milk). If you’re looking for something more straightforward, you’ve got the Doppio (60 mL of espresso, as opposed to the standard 30), the Ristretto (22 mL of concentrated espresso), and the Lungo (90 mL of less concentrated espresso).

Though not quite as complex as Pop Chart’s recent works, it is a bit more useful as a reference. You do not want to mix up your breves with your bombóns when you’re trying to close a deal, business or otherwise.

Buy a print for $27 here.

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Beautiful typography works are always inspiring. And this is why today we gathered a few examples of beautiful typography use in packages to keep you inspired for the weekend. It is nice to observe package details and see how designers use type, colors, textures and shapes to deliver beautiful and eye catching designs. Make sure to click on the images to learn more about each project.

Wiener Honig

Mezcal Buen Viaje

Student Work – Allison Chambers

Melgarejo

Chocolate Naive

NOBLE petite

Stretch Island Fruit Company

FoodWealth

My Olive Tree

Hendrick’s Quinetum

Student Work – Charlie Bailey

Student Work – Jongwon Lee

Two Hands

There seems to be no shortage to experiments with fresh building materials these days: algae buildings, homes built from shipping pallets, 3-D printed houses, and grow-as-you-go 3-D printed houses. Next up, body armor.

Or, rather, precisely coded and manufactured pieces of aluminum, pieced together into body armor. Architect Marc Fornes, who has experimented with creating code-generated physical structures in the past, is scaling down for his next exhibit and building human-sized sculptures instead of buildings.

Fornes hand-writes code, using Python, to find algorithms to create the thinnest and strongest structures possible. The results are like laser-cut 3-D puzzles--but instead of matching images, they match forms and curvatures. His goal is to design new façades that economize materials and logistics. “It’s the relation between fabrication and computation,” Fornes tells Co.Design. “Where can you have the least amount of parts, yet the most intricate shapes?” Up until this point, Fornes’s pieces have resembled swirling white playscapes, or futuristic pavilions. And his proofs of concept have panned out: Three people successfully walked on one his larger structures, built out of aluminum pieces like the ones seen here.

But for his current exhibit at New York’s Moss Bureau, Fornes was forced to size down to get his works in the door. It was quite an adaptation: Fornes and his team decided to funnel architectural theory into a fashion show. “We thought, why not test several options, and present it like a catwalk of similar pieces?” What emerged was Les Danseurs du Tailor: pieces that he says are “a mix between a metal garment, armor, and a system.”

Fornes emphasizes that the seven life-sized figures are prototypes, not sculptures: “The series is just looking at ways to reduce the number of parts. This can definitely apply to large-scale architecture. It’s not for building towers--it’s about figuring out how lightweight structures can be,” he says.

By designing 3-D human-esque figures and digitally moving them into lunging or bending dance positions, Fornes was able to test out ways to make even more complex shapes than before. The intricacy of, say, a human elbow is far more delicate to craft out of thin, precisely cut aluminum than is the side of a building. “That is where we are the computational edge,” he says.

See Les Danseurs at Moss Bureau in New York.