The Essential Stack for Instructional Design and Training: An A-Z Guide - "B" is for "Behance"

What is Behance?

Behance is a hub for creative professionals in the design space. It's a social media platform where designers, artists, and creators share their digital creations and resources. It's a great place to find inspiration for presentations, courses, websites, videos, and more. For those in learning development or instructional design or simply folks who want to make sure their presentations look as good as they can be, this is a goldmine for ideas and a place to keep your finger on the pulse.

Why Should You Use It?

Creative Inspiration

Behance is a treasure trove of beautiful content. In the design space, lots of folks host their portfolios, so you'll find the best of the best and where designers show off the work they're most proud of. Because of that, you'll see innovative eLearning and course layouts, beautiful handout designs, gorgeous illustrations and icons, and excellent PowerPoint presentations.

Networking

If you're looking to bump shoulders with top-tier creative professionals, this is a place where you can find them. Lots of designers post their portfolios here. Behance allows you to follow people and private message them. You can even hire a professional from Behance if you'd like. Shown below is an example of Valentina Hoyos Sarmiento's page on Behance. She is an interactive media designer who, among other things, develops courses with Articulate Storyline.

Showcasing L&D Projects

Though Behance is not the first place many folks look at to find an instructional designer for hire, it is a sought-after and respected destination for many in the greater design space, so posting your creations here can help with your bona fides as well as give you invaluable feedback from professionals on the content you're creating. One goal for many people on Behance is to become featured on Behance. It's seen as a badge of honor. You'll even receive a little Behance flag to denote your project is "featured." You can check out how to get featured on Behance here.

Notable Features

• Advanced Search Functionality - You can find people and projects based on keywords, the tools (both applications and camera equipment) they use, their creative field, and location.

• Moodboards - You can save and organize your favorite projects. So you can curate ideas for inspiration or collect them for a specific theme.

• Follow and Subscribe - You can follow people you want and even opt-in for paid subscriptions for exclusive content from creators.

• Project Appreciation and Feedback - You can "appreciate" projects (similar to like on other social media platforms) and leave comments. This is invaluable if you want to gauge what folks might be thinking about your particular project.

• Adobe Creative Cloud Integration - You can upload right to Behance from many of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of applications.

• Livestreams - You can watch live streams where many creatives showcase their work and insights and offer tutorials on the tools they use.

• Job Listings (the Hire section) - You can offer a service or hire others for creative work.

What Does It Cost?

Behance is entirely free! However, you will need an Adobe ID to log in. You can sign up right at www.behance.net. Here's a blurb directly from the Behance website:

Yes! Participation in Behance is free, and there are no restrictions on the number of projects a member can create. There is also no limit on the number of images/media users can upload. The Behance platform is free for creative professionals across disciplines.

When Would You Use It?

I recommend using Behance in the L&D space for design inspiration, browsing the thousands of projects for innovative ideas to incorporate into your training and learning materials.

From there, collaboration is another place. Though I personally connect better at trade events and in spaces like LinkedIn, Behance can be a place to meet other instructional designers.

Lastly, you can use Behance to get feedback from designers. Most people on Behance are not part of the instructional design discipline, so getting perspective from folks outside of the bubble can be valuable. For example, a UX/UI designer can give you more significant insights into your course's user experience.

How Do I Use it?

I personally exclusively "lurk" (internet slang for consuming a social media platform without contributing much back) on Behance. Whenever I feel the urge to stop working and go to Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube to drift off, I try to go to Behance first. My reasoning is that during those idle moments, I can at least be productive and get some inspiration to help me with my design.

What's nice about Behance is its robust search. You can search a topic like course, eLearning, or presentation; from the results, you can filter by tools. So, for example, once I search for "course," I can filter by "articulate storyline" (the popular eLearning authoring tool that we use at Skill Mammoth), and from there, I can see results of beautiful content that was created in storyline.

You'd think that Adobe would only limit the tools that folks can reference to the ones they sell: Adobe Creative Cloud classics like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and XD. It's nice that Adobe has opened up the platform to all tools.

Once I find a project I like, I save it using the built-in moodboards feature. This helps me keep a list of presentations and courses that inspire me or that I want to emulate.

The Takeaway

Behance is one of the best-kept secrets in the instruction design space because we're sometimes a training function first and a design function second; a lot of instructional designers don't use Behance or keep it in their stack or rhythm. If you're looking to stay on the cutting edge of designs and make sure that your courses, presentations, and eLearning modules, then Behance is a great destination for you.

If you use Behnace, let me know in the comments below, and if you're interested in more articles like this, check out our blog and subscribe to our newsletter.

Remember, in L&D, blending creativity with instructional design can make all the difference. Behance is your ally in this creative journey.

Stay tuned for more from our A-Z guide of instructional design and training tools!