Online Folio Solutions Part 2: Carbon Made Review

In this, the second part of the series, I will be reviewing Carbonmade.

Part 1 (Coroflot)

Part 2 (Carbon Made)

Part 3 (Fig Dig)

Part 4 (Behance)

Part 5 (WordPress)
Running since Feb 2006, Carbonmade is a web 2.0 online folio hosting solution produced by a group called nterface Apps (a.k.a Dave Gorum, Jason Nelson and Spencer Fry) and as of writing their site contains over 72,700 folios in over 45 categories. Including Photography, Graphic Design, Illustration, Web Design and Advertising. According to the stats their largest category is (like Coroflot) Illustration (again I was quite surprised).

Look & Feel

In my opinion the initial look and feel encountered when you navigate to the Carbonmade home page is rather unprofessional in style. It features a few strange, albeit fun, characters including a head sporting a unicorn style antler and a yellow octopus encouraging you to sign up. While the sign in button is labeled Moustache and features a mustache graphic next to it. This coupled with the loud colours set against a black background sets an interesting tone which I haven’t yet managed to find the words to properly describe (best to check it out and make up your own mind). The language used throughout the main Carbonmade site is also quite casual.

However once you reach the actual folios the tone changes significantly for each folio because their look and feel is depending on the preferences set by each individual. Resulting in some very professional looking folios and some rather unprofessional looking ones. Overall though the look and feel of carbon made in the folio area really makes the work stand out.

Features and ease of use

Carbonmade will help you get your folio up and running quickly. To signup you need to enter a portfolio title, a Carbonmade wed address (yourname.carbonmade.com), your full name, email address and a password. You then receive the traditional thank you for signing up email and you are on your way to a Carbonmade folio.

Once you login in you are immediately encouraged to add projects. With the Carbonmade meh(free) option you can have a total of 5 projects, 35 images and 0 videos. However if you want to be able to expand on this you can pay $12US a month to have 50 projects, 500 images and 10 videos plus access to tech-support and the ability to have your folio ad free (however I haven’t noticed adverts anywhere on the carbonmade site).
As well as images, Carbonmade will also allow you to upload flash swf’s into your folio, which for some will be quite handy.

Adding a project is very straight forward. Once you hit the add project button you can add images, add image captions, give the project a title, let viewers know the project client, create notes about the project and add in an external project URL.

The about tab allows you to add your full name, an email for people to contact you, your location, a phone number and info about you. As well as giving you the choice to upload a picture of yourself, add tags on your areas of expertise and skill and notify the world on whether you are not looking for work or available for freelance.

Customization

In the Settings area you have the ability to choose the style of your folio. You can set the colour scheme and font face, as well as edit the footer copy and add in Google analytics tracking (this requires you to register google analytics. While folio statistics are not built into carbonmade the ability to plug into google analytics provides you with very powerful data tools.

Help

Help is not accessible via the control panel, but there is an extensive help/FAQ section accessible via the front page. Although Carbonmade is so straight forward i doubt you’ll be needing it.

Extra Features worth a mention

A nice little blog that covers interviews with the various people who have folios on Carbonmade, as well as announcements and updates relating to Carbonmade.

Pros
1. Free (for meh package)
2. Easy to use, clean web 2.0 backend
3. Featured Folios
4. Quick and easy setup
5. Ability to add in Flash swf’s

Cons
1. Limited file uploads/projects even on paid option
2. Limited customization
3. No job boards
4. Have to pay to get better features
5. List of Folios is cluttered

Other

The creators of Carbonmade have enough confidence in the quality of the Carbonmade folio hosting system that they utilize it to showcase their own work (check out Dave Gorum’s site).

If you’ve got any tips, comment or ideas for online folios that you would like to share, let everyone know in the comments section or send it through to design droplets using the contact page.

Coming up next….Fig Dig.

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