Okay, I’ve had a bit of a play around with the new deviantART portfolios (the awesome version, so they say). When I attended the World Tour in Sydney I picked up the vibe that people were very keen on deviantART having another crack at portfolios. They won’t be disappointed; it’s a HUGE improvement over the old portfolios.

Angelo mentioned to us how many employers would mention specifically “No deviantART portfolios”, and how that was a bit sad. The main reason for that, I think, was the functionality ... or the lack of it. It was just images on a page. With these new portfolios, though, hopefully people will be more accepting.

It comes with a light or dark theme, you can select if you would like a horizontal or vertical navigation bar, and you can select whether you would like to add thumbnails above or below the main image in the galleries, or no thumbnails at all. You can also add custom boxes, however this is only available on the ‘Artist Bio’ page. One other thing you can add is a custom ‘Home Page’ image. One thing I really like is the fact that any images you upload to the portfolio do not necessarily have to originated from deviantART – you can select an image straight from your hard drive.

Other features I like are:

• A custom domain, also with a choice as to what follows it.


• Multiple portfolios (if you would like one for photography, one for photomanipulation, one for literature, et cetera.

Some of you may complain that there’s no CSS and only simple HTML available, and I can understand that. However if you want a completely personalised look, like a real website, then get a real website. It’s not that hard. deviantART has designed this new portfolio system with its artist’s interests in mind, with simplicity in mind. Employers do not want to go through hundreds of portfolios a day, each with a different layout and style. This wastes their time and you could suffer from that.

There are several iffy things that I should mention, though:

• I wish there was a way to adjust the width of the navigation bar when it’s in vertical mode, or for it to expand ... my email address is right on the edge, and it’s not the longest one I’ve seen.


• I don’t like the idea of a limited range of colours available. The ones given aren’t doing it for me either. The colours available have been expanded.


• There’s a glitch that covers part of the header when an image is being loaded in your portfolio, I think this is exclusive to the horizontal navigation.


• On the Artist’s Bio page, the text should really wrap around the image, instead of just starting below. If we the image wasn’t so small it would work, but it just doesn’t cut it with an image that small.


• I would like to add more than one number listed for contact (for example both a mobile and a landline). People will also get confused as to what to put there, in regards to international numbers and such. The location of the artist should also be displayed.


• The sample view that follows you up and down the side when you’re building your portfolio is a bit glitchy. It doesn’t seem to update straight away. Also, there’s no way to preview full-size without submitting it.


• The portfolio title has a very limited character count of 22.


• The tagline always seems to want to display ‘Graphic Design Extraordinaire’, even when I leave that box empty. I’m not one of those. I overcame this by entering just a space, however the space needs to be entered every time you edit the portfolio.


• Users should have the ability to decide on which side to display the custom boxes on the ‘Artist Bio’ page. Also in regards to the custom boxes is the line break HTML tag, which doesn’t work properly. Entered as the legend says, the tags are displayed as normal text. I added a space between ‘br’ and the forward slash and the tags disappeared, but there were no line breaks.


• Where's the ability to watermark images?


• I really don't like the way the nominated colour returns to red every time you edit the portfolio.


• Why not tell us the exact size of the home page image we should have rather than resizing our images? And what's with the border around it? What if I want a transparent image?


• The HTML code shouldn't count towards the character count in the custom boxes.

I haven't tested the uploading/downloading of the résumé ... does anyone have comments on this?