We are also in an age where it's nearly impossible for young designers to get noticed for work opportunities without being reputable online. Which as they're trying to tell us is by living two lives, one online and the other in the real. It's something like a wall I've come up against many times but it's driven by the clientside habits. When i get recommended for work, my clients Google me first, and those first 3 results are the difference between hired and pass on most days. It's just the way life is now.

1. Attend meetups to meet other designers, don't worry about introducing yourself to everybody in the room, focus on a handful and have conversations with them then get their email address.

2. Follow up when you meet someone, send a friendly email and talk about their work. It helps to give them something which could be useful to them, like a cool website. Then you keep the conversation going.

3. Real networking is literally building networks of people who have links to each other, so keep an eye out for opportunities to introduce someone you know to someone you met and vice versa. You can even introduce people you just met to other people you just met. In any of these cases., you have two people who can know each other and both know you. That is a network.

I keep a folder of offline .ASE files but I know where Illustrator keeps it's presets folder for things like Swatches and Brushes so I copy them over to there and it's like i have all my colors natively.

Does this work though?

I don't feel weird at all. That was my business model for a long time, the issue was that unlike you, I wasn't doing it because they were good people. If they could not afford what I was offering to them, and I decided that I would outsource it's only because I know them otherwise I'd have offered them outsourcing from the start. Since I would not consider a project any further if they could not afford me, since it really won't be worth it.

Outsourcing and then directing that designer is something I would do for a higher price and only for services that I don't provide as a designer. It takes effort to direct another designer, it's work.

Well because it doesn't make sense tpay for Playbook and then attach my domain and also make a website, Playbook is a website, so if I pay for Playbook it means I've chosen a website for the long-term.

It's certainly not highly effective.

Don't think I can make that investment. If I pay for Playbook I would give up on getting a website this year. Considering what Playbook is for.

Isn't Behance cumbersome even? You're right 800x600 isn't a lot. There's the caption and then there's attachments. I thought of something else though; Dribbble is more accessible to everyone. Easier.

Can Behance show how a design I s serving project goals? I can't say. I have Behance portfolio; to me it's great for case studies but you know, those take longer to make. I think we can use attachments in a clever way.