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

You won’t want to miss the next Chat Creative panel on August 26th at 6pm CST! What’s this Chat Creative thing? We like to think of ourselves as a design panel for the rest of the world. Our goal is to help connect the creative community one chat at a time.

The  panel includes Aaron Irizarry, Adelle Charles, Chad Engle, Chris Spooner, Kyle Steed, and myself . We will be on hand ready to answer your questions! Head on over to the Chat Creative Blog and submit your questions ahead of time to ensure they get answered. I’m really excited to be a part of this and hope to see you guys Wednesday night.

If you’ve been following me on twitter you are well aware of what I’ve been up to the past few weeks. Today I’m launching another (mini) blog called Daily Design Bits. This blog will feature frequent short posts of all the ‘shiny things I find on and off the interwebs’. Hop on over there and explore (and grab the feed so you don’t miss anything)! You can also submit cool things that you find if you want them to be featured!

Daily Design Bits is powered by Tumblr – which so far has been an AWESOME platform to work with! I’ve got some great content queued up for your viewing pleasure! I’m still tweaking things and setting things up – so if you find something that’s broken shoot me an email and let me know!

Thanks for reading and let me know what you think!

1 Designed by Khoi Vinh

Haven’t heard of Khoi Vinh? Proceed directly to subtraction.com and block out a few hours of your schedule. You will engrossed in his blog. Khoi Vinh is the design director for the in-house team at the New York Times. Khoi is the guy in charge of the NYT website. His clean design style is evident in the design of the site.

2 Grids, grids, grids OH MY!!!

6 column grid structure of the NYT website

The NYT website is extremely well organized – which is probably an understatement. The design is based on a 6 column grid. Everything just feels so nice, and in its rightful place. Grids impart a sense of structure and order to a website.

To me, using grids is very much like alphabetizing things… sooner or later, you realize that the alphabet is an incredibly useful organizing principle. So there was a certain amount of inevitability to it.

- Khoi Vinh on grids

3 Typography & Hierarchy

Hierarchy is one of the most important elements in newspaper design. When I squint my eyes at the NYT website the hierarchy is still evident. The website does an excellent job of differentiating headlines by weight, size and color.

4 Breaking outside the box

I will NEVER get tired of this. I do this all the time in my designs, and I just think its such a nice easy touch to add depth and break out of the ‘box’ of web design. These titles and simple illustrations ad hierarchy and focus to the pages titles and headines.

5 Great content

Not a design element, but I think that the technology (read: nerd) section of the site is very good. This is probably what I read most (besides scanning the headlines). The NYT covers a huge variety of topics on a daily basis – so there’s something in there for everyone.

What do you think?

What newspaper websites or online publications do you read? Any out there that have amazing design? Leave a comment and let me know!

Everyone has their own style of writing and their own process for maintaining their blog. Some of us are very methodical about how we blog and others are more random. Anyway you look at it, almost every blog is different in some way. On any given day, you can browse a blog in the design community and find new and original content. Other times you may find many blogs have posted almost the same thing, but in a different way, with emphasis on a different sub-topic.

AJ over at Phire Design interviewed several bloggers and designers including myself about their blogging process. Read the rest of the post and let me know what you think!

I was interviewed by the lovely people that run Crew Design Blog. Crew Design is the joint collaboration of four young graphic designers living across the United States (two of them are in Boston!!!)

Read the interview and let me know what you think!

So I’m sitting here on my couch, laptop, tv and ipods connected piping info my way. You could say that i’m downright obsessed with information graphics Here’s a roundup of some tasty info graphics covering the election results!

CNN

http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/

Love the detail on this top info bar on the CNN.com website. The number for each candidate are displayed in a flip-clock style. They also have an interactive flash flash map that is simple and sleek. CNN’s on air graphics are also amazing! And whats this? CNN HAS HOLOGRAMS??? Welcome to the future!!!

Good Magazine

http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/goodsheet/goodsheet008VoterGuide.html

Lots of facts displayed in a small area and yet it still had a nice hierarchy.

Newsweek Election Night Cheat Sheet

http://www.newsweek.com/id/155183

This chart is like a “Choose your own adventure game” slightly amusing and interesting way to approach the election.

Yahoo Political Dashboard

http://news.yahoo.com/election/2008/dashboard;_ylt=Au07rrhG5ERjmvDWA6fcNPgSq594

This flash based graphic has a tab to create your own scenario much like the newsweek graphic.

An Orange America

http://anorangeamerica.com/

Interesting twitter visualization of mentions of key words and how they relate to Obama or McCain

USA Today

http://usatoday.com

Looks like usa today has the standard interactive map with a barchart above that reaches 270 in the middle.

New York Times

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html

Nice detail on specific counties on the NYT map. They also just added a sweet 3D map of the vote in each county.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/election/uscounties.html

Fox News

http://elections.foxnews.com/states_map/index.html?stateAbbr=OK

Fox news has a slightly garish gradient flash thing going on. Looks like an icky cross between flash and 3d rendering. heh.

Newseum

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp
Frontpages of the nations newspapers with articles about Obama winning!

Find any cool election graphics? Leave a comment and let me know and Ill add it to the list!

Yay for blogs!  Collis from Envato asked me if I would contribute to Creattica Daily.  This will be part of a family of inspiration sites for graphic designers. How is this different from my blog? Well…this one is more strictly graphic design related. I usally write whatever the hell I want on my blog So go over and check it out and subscribe if you like it! Collis and maybe some others will also be writing as well! Yay!

http://daily.creattica.com/

And no worries – I will still be blogging here just as much – because I am an internet addict