Why designers rarely update their profile?

We’ve decided to collect the current database of really cool designers from the whole world and while doing it we noticed the common regularity. Most of the designers and companies rarely show their current or new projects. Let’s find out why it happens? ⚡️

I guess that they just really busy and don’t have time for it, just like us. Well, In a serious manner, many interesting designers and companies that used to be active don’t show up any news but this does not always mean that they have quit or have reduced projects amount. Contrariwise, they probably improved their skills or doing something more interesting, but why wouldn’t they give us pleasure to know about it and please us with this info on rarely basis?

From my side I can honestly point out four reasons for Chapps team that force us to publish works not that often as we really want to:

Project development time (Time Value)

Our typical project takes 2–5 months. On some more complicated projects we work about 1 year, and if initially we have a great passion to show up our ideas and what we’ve done, but at the final stage we get accustomed to the project design so that it seems to be not that stunning and we loose the willingness to add it to our portfolio. Well yes, after having a beautiful concepts in the beginning, we iteratively get to the high quality product design, and then almost in every case it becomes simple and intuitive. And its pretty common that with such design you would be able to impress the already spoiled with a nice feed design community.

Surely, if you work with large companies that with their userbase can define and popularize their own interface patterns then it would radically change everything. In this case, you can often gratify your followers, but, unfortunately, these large companies do not really need to outsource because they contain their own design departments in house that with rare exceptions usually cope with the tasks. Plus there are many other different legal constraints and difficulties, but we will highlight these in our articles from our IP Lawyer.

Spoiled the community.

Even in the case when there is a desire and ability to share the work, we realize that we can not just take a screen from the Sketch and show it as it is. As a minimum we need to think on how to improve the details, how to emphasize the content, how to choose the right keywords in order to get the right clients find us within others, how to find the right mockup of new phone model, to write the right text, to optimize the gif animation(if you really want to show it dynamically since nowadays just static mockups you would not impress anyone) and in general just spend a lot of time. And thank to Dribble, it does not require much time to prepare work for it (that is why it was progressing up rapidly within the last 8 years), and what to do with Behance? There’s literally speaking a personal hell. You have to prepare and provide the whole design-landing and its more cool if its more longer and bigger. Even when you shown up all the screens, came up and wrote the story you start adding garbage like colors with codes and fonts demonstrating each and every letter.

We think that most people don’t eve understand what is the branding book for and how it should be used, but they do it because all others do it, without understanding that it does not help to succeed. But the most annoying thing is that such design-landing should be finished in a classic way : “Thank you for viewing» and then get comments like :

«Great job, nice colors, awesome icons,

BUT please take a look at my works as well»

It kills any passion at all to publish the work.

We get impressed by the companies and designers that constantly post new cases. Where do you get that much time?) We, probably, will start do so if we would run out of projects, but its four years since we are waiting for this gap.

Forbidden to publish (NDA)

Its really sad, but most part of the coolest projects we work on don’t give us any permission for publication these. Its prohibited even if we hide the name and adjust the design a bit. We even had cases when it was forbidden to post unaccepted variants since the customer owns the intellectual property (wtf though?). Based on our personal experience most of the projects we get specifically from the Silicon Valley, as usual, are something really cool. Whenever we just mention or ask either we can add this project to our portfolio they stop as right away saying

«Hey! We have signed the NDA!»

And the most saddest part is that most of such projects has not been implemented to go live or the NDA period expired but we don’t really want to post these after two-three years past. But taking into count how fast the trends are changing we don’t have time to reanimate and restyle the old works.

Popularity

In a past we were afraid to publish variety of works since we already were so overloaded with emails and offers and were not able process them all out. But these days are gone along with increased competition and with capturing the market by the similar hungry companies. Today our name is working on us and we have a different leads sources, but requests from the design communities have decreased in 10 times. Take a look, every one is a designer now and you see designers everywhere! Worldwide events collect more and more people and this niche is actively increasing up. Its sad to know that its so hard to reach the worldwide level for lots of yang and talented companies due to these reasons.

Lyrical digression

Portfolio Online

Its even more complicated with the portfolio on our website even more complicated than on Dribbble and Behance combined together. You should agree that most of the companies and designers update their works together with the website redesign. Although the works is usually the only dynamic section on designers website. Creating our own website was the first task for us when we founded Chapps, but due to the hight flow of projects we managed to develop and release our website only last year since how the company can exist without website ?:)

On the initial contact with our clients we present our actual works that we collect into PDF file and update it every 2–3 months, and on our website we are planning to remove our works presentation and then just send the link for PDF instead, however it might be not very convenient.

What about you? For what reasons you don’t keep your portfolio up to date? What does still force you to do it? Please share your secrets or share our pain with us :)

The post has been created by Dmitry Chuta — the product designer and founder of Chapps Digital Agency. If you liked the post and found it interested please thumb up and like it or follow.