Social design communities can be found all over the web and can play a vital role in growing and learning as a designer. I will be reviewing four of my favorites: Flickr, DeviantART, Coroflot and Behance and discussing the positives and negatives of each community.

Flickr is mainly geared towards showing off photography, but you can often find wallpaper designs and other pieces of artwork. Flickr was one of the first sites I actively engaged in using, and was first recommended to use the site after a lecturer at university directed me towards using its vast library of images for work as opposed to using Google image search. It’s advantages include its simplicity of in use once you have setup a user account (the negative is that you have to setup the account using a yahoo address, which owns Flickr.) There are also desktop applications you can use to upload large amounts of photos and designs at once.

The site also offers pro accounts (which cut out on advertising) for the professional user which allows you to display unlimited amounts of photos and storage space as well as giving access to  page views and stats. The current free account offers 100mb of monthly photo uploads as well as restricted video uploading. As a user who will only upload a handful of images and designs each year the free account is more than plenty.  If you exceed this limit the pro account is only $24.95 a year.

DeviantART is a community that has been running for ten years and has over 50 million pieces of user-generated content.  You are virtually unlimited in what you can show to its community of users. If you have a design that needs some critique or simply want to browse great photography, designs, interfaces, wallpapers, etc then DeviantART will have everything you need. Users interact freely and the site as a whole has a great interactive element in all its features, whether it’s the groups, critiques or selling your artwork.

The site has often been described as part portfolio and part social networking. As a free user you can access the forums, make friends, put up artwork and even have your own blog. You also sell your artwork in various forms such as prints, t-shirts, bags etc. The premium account is again available for a price of £18.40 a year, with this it brings more benefits than a Flickr account and offers a premium portfolio, stats, premium widgets, and ad free browsing. The premium coverage is definitely worth the money if you are going to work with the site on a regular basis.  The amount of premium benefits are massive and significantly improve your deviant service and are much better in comparison to Flickr.

Coroflot is a portfolio hosting site aimed mostly at product designers, industrial designers and graphic designers.  The site makes it brilliantly easy to showcase your design work, get feedback and attract potential employers. I use Coroflot to showcase both my graphic design and product design work. I started using Coroflot as a place to direct clients, friends, and fellow designers while I worked on creating my own domain to host my portfolio.

Coroflot makes it easy to  browse through other users work and offer feedback as well as liking or bookmarking images. This allows you to create a bank of bookmarked images much like Flickr and DeviantART offer. When browsing work on Coroflot I find a great variety of inspiring work from students projects and concept designs, to professional work done at fancy design studios. (Not jealous at all.) Coroflot also offers detailed traffic statistics for various sections of your portfolio, as well detailing the popularity of individual images.

The Behance Network is very similar to Coroflot in terms of interaction and feedback. The thumbs up system is much less emphasized in comparison to  other sites. Behance is focused on the feedback system and commenting on other users work. Friends are easily organized into circles, which makes it easy to organize by discipline or subject matter. As a website I don’t think it fully functions as well as the other three websites do, lacking in functionality in some areas.

My Favorite Social Design Community

I would rate deviantART above the rest due to its overall variety of content and interactive community. The community is so widespread and it features everything that you need as a designer,photographer or artist. Whether your an expert or a rank amateur you are able to showcase all levels of work and the pro account allows for full utilization of the complete features found on the website.

Other Places To Find Community

Freelance Switch Forums
An active community of designers, programmers and freelancers.

Design Community Twitter Hours
Design Community Twitter Hours
Thursday 6-8pm (eastern time, east coast)
I am usually more than happy to answer tweets, give feedback, help, anything I can do so just shout at me @chadengle

How Design Forums
Companion forums for the poplar How Design magazine. Lots of active designers discussing and critiquing each others work.

Design Democracy
The social network for graphic designers, web designers and the creative arts.
It’s a community of real people doing real design. We’re here for the everyday designers — the ones just breaking into the industry, the ones with 20-some years under their belt, the ones working long hours at an agency, the ones who’ve been singing the freelancer’s tune for quite a while…they’re the ones who love learning, who love to inspire and be inspired and enjoy the camaraderie and friendship of other designers.

Designers Couch
A group established to embrace creativity through inspiration,

encouraging designers to network with fellow creatives and share

their knowledge of design.

Society 6
Society6 is a platform for the world’s artists and creatives to promote their work and connect with unique opportunities.

Design Chat
#designchat is a weekly real-time twitter-based conversation between creatives. Video chats start at 8pm CST on Wednesdays and last about an hour on mashable.com/chat. You can continue before and after on twitterfall.com/#designchat.

Which site would you recommend?

Do you have any other sites you use? Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Jared Thompson is a keen product and graphic designer.  He has a passion for the works and designers of the Bauhaus movement and strongly believes that ‘less is more.’ Jared is currently studying Product Design at the Northern School of Design. Visit Jared’s website Design Juices or follow Jared on Twitter