How to present your startup on Behance
TL;DR
Behance, part of Adobe, is a free platform for creative portfolios where designers, illustrators and studios publish their work as projects. A startup uses it to tell the story behind its brand, app or website design, ideally through a Team page that collects the projects of everyone who worked on it. Publishing is free, and Behance Pro starts at $9.99 a month on an annual commitment.
What is Behance?
Behance is Adobe's network for publishing and discovering creative work. Each project is a long page of images, video, text and embeds: a logo redesign, a mobile app case study, a packaging series. Visitors follow creators and give "appreciations", and companies switch to the hirer view to find freelancers and post jobs.
Behance curators hand-pick projects every day for the featured galleries, based on creativity, execution and originality. There is no application form for a feature: the curators find projects themselves.
The domain authority of 92 belongs to behance.net. Your benefit is discovery by designers, design writers and future hires, plus a credible page that shows how your product was built.
Who should post on Behance?
- Startups with a strong visual identity, app interface or packaging, and a designer willing to write up the process.
- Design-led products, such as tools for creatives, fonts, templates or creative courses, whose buyers browse Behance.
- Founders hiring designers: a good case study tells candidates what your team cares about.
- Skip it if you only have a landing page and no design story. A thin project with three screenshots gets no attention and no feature.
- Skip it if you want sales leads from people outside the creative world. Behance is built for creative professionals and the people who hire them.
How much does Behance cost?
A Behance account with unlimited projects is free. Behance Pro starts at $9.99 a month with an annual commitment, prices vary by country (the EU page shows €12.93 a month), and a 7-day free trial is offered where available.
Pro adds password-protected and link-only projects, scheduled publishing up to 90 days ahead, Pro Stats with traffic sources and search terms, project boosts, an Adobe Portfolio website and 0% platform fees on freelance projects, asset sales and subscriptions. For accounts without Pro, the Behance Pro page lists platform fees of 15 to 30% on those transactions. Pro works on personal Adobe accounts only, not on Enterprise or Team accounts.
How do you share your startup on Behance?
- Sign up at behance.net and fill in your profile with your role, location and website.
- Click Share Your Work at the top of the page and choose Project.
- Add images, video, text and embeds. Save regularly, because projects do not auto-save.
- Click Continue, upload a cover image, write a title, choose a creative field and add tags. Cover, title and creative field are required.
- Click Publish. To group work under your company, create a Team page, invite your designers and confirm the projects they add to it.
- Play fair: spam, misleading content and bought appreciations or views get projects removed from search and accounts suspended.
Tips to get more out of Behance
- Write the project as a case study: the problem, early sketches, rejected directions, the final system and the result.
- Make the cover image readable at thumbnail size, since it decides whether people click in the feed.
- Choose the creative field and tags that match how designers search, such as "fintech app", "brand identity" or "packaging design".
- Credit every designer and agency on the project, so it also appears on their profiles and reaches their followers.
- Link to the live product and your website inside the project and on your profile.
Our verdict
Behance works for startups with real design work to show and a designer who can tell the story. Publishing costs nothing, and a featured project puts your brand in front of the creative community. Startups without a visual story should spend this time on channels where their customers look.
More options: see all design galleries and portfolio sites. Planning your launch? The Fe/male Switch startup game walks women founders from idea to first customers.