How we created a better way to share portfolios over e-mail

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With the growing influence of design in business and the number of opportunities available for designers today, there's still one snag in the ecosystem: E-mails still aren't effective when it comes to sharing portfolios.

A couple of months back, I was on the lookout for a freelance designer who is also a Wordpress expert. I put up a post on LinkedIn and within a couple of days I had 30,000+ views on my post and over 125 comments.

This lead to over 150 emails hitting my inbox! However, my search for my freelancer just became tougher. I had to go through tonnes of links which look cluttered and ended up downloading lots of bulky attachments. And as a designer myself, the e-mails just looked plain and simple with nothing particularly catching my attention and setting itself apart from the others.

I could not quickly glimpse their portfolio as the mail content lacked thumbnails and lot of designers had shared separate links to individual projects which made the emails lengthy, boring, and ugly.

The team at IndieFolio thought long and hard about how can we solve this small but important problem and after a month of development, we've come up with Insert: a beautiful way to share your portfolios over e-mail.

Insert let's you easily share portfolios over email in a way that looks great and offers increased effectiveness at the same time. Simply connect your IndieFolio or Dribbble portfolio, select the projects you want to share, and Insert!

When we were figuring what would be the best solution to this problem, everyone unanimously agreed that:

1. This tool needs to be available right when the e-mail is being shared

2. Selection of projects needs to be quick and easy

3. Every input needs to be customizable for maximum flexibility

Keeping the above in mind, we started creating a Chrome extension, integrated with IndieFolio & Dribbble which inserts HTML into your e-mail body so you can modify every element in the body itself.

Initial Userflow

We wanted to keep minimal steps. We stuck to 3 simple steps; connect your portfolio and select your projects, select the layout and insert your beautiful thumbnails right into the e-mail.

We worked with the Iconscout team to bring this plugin to life. We made the navigation crisper, improved the iconography, and enhanced the overall experience.

Final Userflow

With this plugin, I hope we are able to solve this important problem for the creative community and make it easier to make something as ubiquitous as an e-mail more designer-friendly. Do download the free plugin and give us your feedback :)

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