Adobe Creative Cloud Across the Curriculum: A Guide for Students and Teachers

9C: Which Adobe Portfolio Application is Right for Me?

Portfolio

Portfolio might be the most aptly named application within the entire Adobe Creative Cloud because it is exactly that: a way to create and share a portfolio of your work online.  Portfolio tastefully collects and showcases samples of your work, each of which is organized as a different "project" in Portfolio.  The application offers you a variety of elegant, professionally designed templates for your portfolio.  If your project is something larger or more complex than a single photograph or image file, you can embed a link in your Portfolio to that work located elsewhere online.  For example, Portfolio creates a tile/thumbnail for users to click on to link to an online version of an InDesign multi-page document or Dreamweaver website that you built or a Premiere Pro video that you uploaded to Vimeo.  And, of course, Portfolio is integrated with your Creative Cloud account and with Behance to showcase your projects seamlessly.  Portfolio can be integrated with Behance, but you do not have to use Behance to showcase your work in Portfolio.

Behance

You might call Behance a media-social site, rather than a social-media site, because it showcases members' visual productions more so than their social connections.  In fact, it is actually more of a media-professional-networking site, rather than a social media site, with the unofficial "word on the street" being that "Behance is like Linkedin for creative professionals."  Behance can be integrated with your Portfolio, but you do not have to use Portfolio to showcase your work in Behance.  Portfolio is designed more for the individual, whereas Behance offers networking functions such as organizational teams and "like" and "comments" features.  Behance collects and shares your projects in a collection of tiles with a uniform appearance, whereas Portfolio site design can be customized.  If your project is something larger or more complex than a single photograph or image file, you can embed a link in a Behance to that work located elsewhere online.  For example, Behance creates a tile/thumbnail for users to click on to link to an online version of an InDesign multi-page document or Dreamweaver website that you built or a Premiere Pro video that you uploaded to Vimeo.

InDesign CC

The word "folio" comes from the word "leaf," and it used to be that portfolios were produced and shared almost exclusively on paper (and very often on the highest-quality paper available, since a professional portfolio is meant to represent your very best work).  Visual artists and creative professionals often still need high-quality print versions of their work, and you probably don't ever want to walk into a job interview without a nice, crisp paper version of your resume available.  These days, most professionals need to be able represent themselves and their work digitally as well, and InDesign makes it particularly easy to move between both worlds: print and online.  If you are likely to need a print version of your work, then InDesign might be the best place to begin.  InDesign has a number of ways to design a document simultaneously for both print and online publication.  When launching a new InDesign project you can choose among print, web, and mobile preset templates.  Within InDesign, you have a number of different workspace choices, including Essentials, Book, Digital Publishing, and Interactive PDF.  There is a "Publish Online" button option near the top of the screen to share any InDesign project.  Of course, Adobe invented the game-changing PDF format to make precisely designed documents portable in the first place -- so you can use InDesign (and Acrobat) to share digital, PDF versions of your too.

This page has paths: