Top Tips to Ace your Digital Design Portfolio

This blog post is written by our friend Samantha Lloyd at Hover.

You’ve worked hard to establish yourself in your professional field. You are rarely spotted without your beautiful, physical portfolio full of pieces and brands you’ve created from scratch and the story behind each. You know that you could expand your reach if you could send your entire portfolio with a click of a button. It’s time to create your portfolio website so that you can show off your history of design work with ease. Hover is here with a few tips to find the perfect domain name that’ll speak to your brand and your creations.

Your domain name is the jumping off point for your entire brand. You share your domain name on your business cards, your social media profiles, and with every person you connect with professionally. When you have an interesting domain name it strikes up conversation and creates memorability. But - with so many domain options out there, which one is the best for you? It depends on what you do, but we have a couple favorites for designers.

First, you need to choose a name. It can be your brand name, your company’s name, or your personal name. It depends how you have structured your business and how you want to push your brand forth online. Many people are synonymous with their brand, whereas others like to handle their company from behind the scenes. You need to select the route that suits you best to find the perfect name for your company.

After you’ve chosen your name, you need to find an extension. It’s true that you won’t always find the domain name you originally had in mind. With domain registrations increasing each year, there are billions of names that are already taken - but also many more that are not. Using new or unique extensions gives you a better chance of scoring that exact company or brand name you wanted in a domain.

To get you started:

Do you Design in Digital?

If you design in digital - be it through Autocad, Adobe Suite, or any number of programs - it’s important to highlight the work you do. The .DESIGN domain speaks to your design capabilities across all mediums. Use the .DESIGN domain name to exhibit a digital gallery of your creations and boost your brand. Join the ranks of large companies, such as Adobe and Uber, and secure your .DESIGN domain.

Do you Design in Ink?

Those who design in ink may find themselves enthralled with the .INK domain name. Whether you put pen to paper, skin, or print, the .INK domain name is a way to grab attention and focus on what you bring to the table. There are many interesting ways to use a .INK domain to amplify your brand.

Now that you have a domain name and the perfect extension, it’s time to upload your incredible portfolio to that domain name. Build a beautiful website using a website builder or your own design skills to customize a brilliant piece of art to showcase your work. We can’t wait to see what you create.

How a .design Domain Name can Boost your Brand

This blog post is written by our friend Samantha Lloyd at Hover.

It’s easy to think that a domain name is merely a link to your website, and has no significant impact on your brand… but you know better than that! The value of a powerful and memorable domain name cannot be understated. You share your website on your print media - business cards, pamphlets, ads, and through your digital marketing efforts. When you choose a domain name that directly reflects your craft, you help elevate your company online. The .design domain name is the best option for designers to boost their brand.

See below for how a niche domain name, perfectly tailored to the designers of the world, makes a difference to your brand:

Brand Association

When you have a domain name that speaks to the type of product or service available on that website, it will better stick in user’s minds. Associate your brand with exactly what you do. Your brand is about design and should live on a home online that speaks to that.

Grow your Network

Growing a network of other designers to collaborate with or bounce ideas off of is a great idea to expand your portfolio and learn of opportunities suited to you. Let others know that you’re a designer through your domain name, which you can display prominently on business cards, print media, and on social.

Showcase your Work

When you’re focused on attracting clients, or landing that dream job, you know the importance of posting a portfolio of work online. Whether, as a designer, you’ve worked hard building a portfolio of custom typography, architecture drawings, brand work, or high fashion sketches, your work should be on exhibit to the world.

Attract an Audience

Attract your audience with a .design domain so that those searching for your type of work know exactly what to expect when they land on your website. They can view your portfolio, get in touch to work with you, and more. This domain name extension tells your potential audience they’re landing on a place dedicate to design.

Display your Rebrand

If you’re a large company, or part of one, that has gone through an overhaul of your brand, you deserve to explain the story behind that transition. Use the .design domain, like Uber has with uber.design to push your rebrand out to your customers. All brands deserve to give their design teams a place to share updates about design changes happening to the brand, website, or company overall.

The .design domain name can have a significant impact on the brand you put out to the online world. Show who you are and what you create on the perfect domain for you. Boost your brand and all that you have created on a .design domain name extension.

Want to read more? We wrote a guest blog for our .ink domain and published on Hover. Click here to check it out!

adobe.design In Their Own Words

While we’ve been celebrating the launches of many amazing .design sites by household brands (NBD, just facebook.design, airbnb.design, amazon.design, and over a dozen others), this one is really special: adobe.design!

That’s because Adobe is the preeminent design company, perhaps they are not as well-known (yet) for their actual design work like Airbnb is, but they are the creators of the software that designers use and live with. In fact, the adobe.design site is clearly an attempt to make them more relevant for their internal design and their customer-facing design rather than just their software. The launch of adobe.design is a fantastic sign that .design is reaching all types of people and companies, and it will be a means to bring together the design community for a long time.

Rather than put my own spin on it, I’d rather highlight the words of Adobe’s VP of Design, Jamie Myrold, on her her inaugural post to adobe.design:

“In all of [our] efforts, it’s designers who are illuminating the path forward. That’s because more than ever, all of us at Adobe know that we’re creating software for a world where design is valued at every level, in every detail. This conviction about the essential nature of design is what makes this the most exciting time to work at Adobe in my many years here.

This is why, for the first time ever, the design team has put forward a public presence in the form of this website, adobe.design. I hope you’ll take a moment to look and around to see for yourself some of what we’re doing and also what we’re thinking as we undertake the challenges facing the design profession in the coming years.

And if you’re excited by what you see, about the possibilities inherent in creating tools that amplify the world’s ability to create and communicate, then let’s talk! Adobe Design is growing and we have a wide range of open roles for designers like yourself who want to take part in a truly amazing, design-led transformation.”

ICP approved in Beijing

Earlier this month, we were informed that all our TLDs -.design, .wiki and .ink - are ICP approved in Beijing, which means all Internet users in Beijing can now build and operate their .design/.wiki/.ink websites, along with in other provinces in mainland China.

Internet Content Provider, or ICP, is a permit issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) to permit China-based websites to operate in China. It is a domain registry’s responsibility to obtain an ICP for its TLD(s). 

There was a lot of hard work went into the process, which makes the approval particularly exciting for our China team, in addition to all our TLDs being approved by MIIT earlier this year. In recent months, we have seen plenty of well-organized, Chinese culture influenced .design websites emerging from Chinese communities (i.e., loong.design, 9x9.design, du.design, ruolan.design, wechat.design, etc). With the ICP permit, we are confident to anticipate that the world will see more and more Chinese websites using our TLDs.

For more China-focused content, please follow our official WeChat account TopLevelDesignChina