Profolio
Global platform for 40,000 artists
We believe that creating is an essential necessity of a fulfilling life. Profolio lets thousands of creatives around the world spend less time managing your work and more time making it. It’s a platform for genius. It’s a platform for artists. It’s the way to make your mark.
- Role Founder, Design, Development
- Website www.yourprofolio.com
The Artist's Dilemma
Being an artist is like running a restaurant. A restaurant of course needs to make delicious food, but it also needs someone who can manage the everyday duties. The artist’s common dilemma is that he or she really only starts a restaurant to make delicious food.
The Original Profolio
Profolio started in 2008. Because I wanted to show off my artwork (and was a budding web developer), I had made a simple PHP content management system that fixed this problem for artists and their websites—upload pictures of your art, and done. An instantly updated, beautiful website.
It was a single page that acted as a vessel to the work of the artist and nothing more, a solution that worked for all types of visual creatives: painters, illustrators, designers, tattoo artists, sculptors and architects.
40,000 Artists from 162 Countries
Based on a hyper-intuitive user experience, Profolio took off. From the US to France to Italy to Russia, artists from all over the world used the platform to show off their work.
What more did artists want? Profolio provided the website, but there was a bigger question—what does it take to be an artist these days? The idea took shape to provide practical articles and a curated set of professional, income-providing opportunities.
Managing 40,000 Portfolios
From drag and drop to easy multi-selections, the strength of Profolio is the flexible ease of use. Whether editing a single piece or half the portfolio, the intuitive web-based interface makes an artist’s life easier.
Crafting a Universal Template
Artists of all types have vastly different bodies of work. Digitally however, most creatives' works can be organized almost identically. Crafting a template works if it fits holistically all the below criteria.
Moving Quickly
Being a single handed designer/developer/founder/and-everything-in-between meant I could take the liberty of "quick mockups". These designs were not pixel perfect but rather acted more similarly to moodboards, except for interfaces rather than brands.
What Lies Ahead
The challenges for artists in today's world are plenty, and there exists tremendous opportunity for improving the solutions. Profolio moves forward with the gaol of aiding creatives with technology in order to open the doors wide to these opportunities.
