Goal
Get your work in front of the people who are actually searching for designers to hire.
Audience
Students who already have a Behance portfolio from another class, and anyone who wants a second place for the same work after the course.
Process
Complete your profile, create a project, upload your work, write about it, publish. Then keep it fed.
Why you might add it
Every other platform on this list waits for someone to type in your address. Behance is the only one where employers show up on their own and search for people. Recruiters, creative directors, and studios browse Behance looking for talent. That is a completely different kind of value, and it is free.
Your course portfolio lives in Google Sites, in your Maricopa account or a personal Google account. If you already have a Behance portfolio from another class, you may use it instead. Otherwise Behance is optional: a good second place for the same work, because recruiters search it.
behance.net/yourname a profile photo, a bio, and a grid of projects. It looks like a professional portfolio, and it looks like everyone else’s professional portfolio. That is the trade.
You already have an account
Behance runs on your Adobe ID, and you have one through Maricopa. You do not need to sign up for anything new or pay for anything.
Set it up
- Go to behance.net and sign in with your Adobe / Maricopa account.
- Complete your profile. Real name, your location, and a one-line bio about the kind of work you want to do. Add a profile photo. An empty profile reads as abandoned, and recruiters skip it.
- Click Create a Project.
- Upload your work. Lead with your strongest image. People decide in about two seconds whether to keep scrolling.
- Give it a real title. Not “Project 1.” Something like “Destination Poster, Postcard, and Social Media Campaign.”
- Write a description. Two or three sentences: what it is, what tools you used, and what problem you were solving. This is where you sound like a designer instead of a student.
- Embed your walkthrough video so people can hear you think through the work.
- Tag it with the right categories (Graphic Design, Motion Graphics, Branding). Tags are how search finds you. Do not skip this.
- Publish.
- Clean up your URL. In settings, set your username so your address is
behance.net/yournamenotbehance.net/yourname12345. That is the link that goes on your résumé.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Employers search it. No other platform here does this.
- Free forever. Nothing to cancel, nothing to lapse.
- You already have the account.
- Zero technical skill required.
- Feeds straight into Adobe Portfolio if you build a site there later. No duplicate work.
- Other designers see your work, which is good for feedback and networking.
Cons
- No custom domain, ever. Always
behance.net/yourname. - Your work lives inside Adobe’s design, not yours.
- It is a profile, not a full website. No custom pages, no services page.
- It is a public social platform. If you are not comfortable with that, do not use it, and build a site instead.
- A dead profile looks worse than no profile. If you post once and vanish, that shows.
After you graduate. Your Behance is tied to your school Adobe ID right now. Adobe lets you migrate your profile to a free personal Adobe account when you leave, so you keep everything. You do not need a paid subscription to keep a Behance profile. That is true of Behance, and it is not true of Adobe Portfolio. Do not confuse the two.
Resources
- behance.net · sign in with your Adobe school account
- Behance Help Center
- Before you build: go look at five portfolios of people doing the job you want. Notice what they lead with.
Platforms change their plans and their menus constantly. If a step here does not match what you see on screen, tell me and I will fix the page.