Category: Curation

Behance Curates: Describing and Categorizing Your Creative Work

This post is part of a series written in collaboration with the Behance Curation Team, the experts on staff who select projects to be featured in Behance’s main Gallery and 12+ Curated “Served” Sites. Click here to see the first post in the series.

After you’ve uploaded the meat of your project - the actual content - there are still important steps to take to round out your project and present a strong, cohesive work. First, choose the right creative field for your work and yourself. Then, provide context for your work by adding text and tags.

Choosing the right creative field for your work and yourself

1) Categorizing your work:
When choosing the creative field for a project, select the creative field that represents your role, not necessarily the work as a whole.  If your project is a short film, and your role was in sound design, make sure you select Sound Design, not just Film in general, as the creative field. This is the opportunity to highlight the specific work you did.

2) Categorizing yourself: Think about your ideal role-what are the creative fields you’d want to be hired or recruited for? Those fields are the only ones you should list on your profile. You can showcase your interests in other fields in projects, but the profile should highlight your core skillset.


Providing context for your work

1) Specify your role: Take the time to explain your work: Why did you create this work? How did it come together? What does it mean? In some creative fields, explaining your work can be just as important as the work itself. Take the time to tell the story and process behind the piece.

2) Use the right tags and include your team: Tags help your work to be found. Including a few tags regarding genre, technique, or other elements will ensure it pops up in the right searches. Add credits or co-ownership for other members of your crew to make your project even more connected.

Behance Curates: Choosing a Striking Project Cover

This post is part of a series written in collaboration with the Behance Curation Team, the experts on staff who select projects to be featured in Behance’s main Gallery and 12+ Curated “Served” Sites. Click here to see more posts from this series.

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore different aspects of the project creation process, and outline how to create the best project possible. Last time, we looked at general factors that go into “What Makes a Project Feature-Worthy.” Now, let’s dig into the nitty gritty of Projects, staring with Project Covers.

The cover image is the face of your project. It’s the first thing people see when they encounter your work, so it’s your best opportunity to invite people to take a closer look.

When choosing a cover, select an image that highlights the look and feel of the project. The cover needs to be appealing-it should make people want to click to see more-but it also needs to be a solid representation of the project. If it’s a great image but doesn’t translate what’s inside, people may be disappointed when they get to the main content.

A few more things to keep in mind:

  • Stay visual. You have plenty of opportunities to explain your project in words with the description and fields, there’s no need to add text to the cover image.
  • Consider including a full size version of your cover inside the project. If people love the cover, they’ll want to get the chance to examine the whole thing.
  • For motion graphics, especially in ads, choose a screencapture that showcases the narrative of the piece.


For excellent cover inspiration in your creative field, visit theserved.com for a curated look at the best projects (and covers) of the moment.

Behance Curates: What Makes a Project Feature-Worthy?

This post is part of a series written in collaboration with the Behance Curation Team, the experts on staff who select projects to be featured in Behance’s main Gallery and 12+ Curated “Served” Sites. Click here to see the first post in the series. 

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore different aspects of the project creation process, and outline how to create the best project possible. Here are a few concrete things that our curators look in a featureable project:

1) Project Length
Generally, projects should have 6-20 images-without repetition. It’s rare to see a Featured Project with just 1 or 2 images in it. If your project is showcasing a single piece of work - say, a mural - it’s important to show detailed view of this piece to create more content for the project.

2) Large Images
Make sure your project is on the larger size, ideally around 600 pixels. Our curators look out for good quality and resolution, and a consistent image width throughout the project.

3) Pure Images - No Watermarks!
We find that watermarks and other ownership marks distract from the media in a project, so we would warn against including these in your project.

4) A complete, polished project
Many people publish partially completed projects, and then finish them later on. Because our curators can’t look at a project each time that it is edited, we suggest only publishing projects when they’re ready to be considered for the Featured Gallery. (Many people use Behance to publish work-in-progress, and then get feedback. This is fine! But for the greatest chance of getting featured, we suggest creating a totally new project once you’ve taken your edited based on your feedback).


An example of a given day’s “Featured Gallery.”

Behance Curates: Our Philosophy

What brings people to Behance? For most people, it starts with a creative project that blew them away and left an impression they won’t soon forget. An incredible photoset (a father’s photochronicle of his daughter’s life) or a novel approach to branding (like this stripped-down approach): it’s stunning work like this that brings millions of people to Behance every month.

While the number of “appreciations” is the default for people who search Behance, the “Featured Gallery” is the first page visitors see. It’s full of carefully selected work from across all industries that “challenges conventions and pushes the creative world forward.”

It’s no surprise that we get a lot of questions from members about how these “featured” projects are chosen. Here are a few facts:

  • Every project published is eligible to be featured on Behance and/or any of our 12+ Curated Galleries.
  • Of the many thousands of projects published every day on Behance, less than 1% are selected to be featured by our Curators.
  • Behance’s Curators are trying to expose especially innovative and well-crafted work. They consider all sorts of factors when reviewing a project, including quality and originality of work, presentation of the project, and the traction it is getting in the community (appreciations, comments, etc…).

For tips on how to get featured, see this blog post from the curatorial team.

This post is the first in a series written in collaboration with our Curation Team, the experts at Behance who review the thousands of new projects uploaded to Behance every day - across dozens of creative fields.

So, why are we writing this series?
1) To give more explanation of how (and using what criteria) these projects are chosen.
2) To give helpful tips on how to make your projects more “featureable.”

So, how can you give your next project the best chance to be featured in the gallery? We’ll be sitting down with the curation team for a series of blog posts about how to create a great project, and the best practices of our most successful members.

Stay tuned for regular tips from our curation team!