Pinterest! The new social media phenomenon sweeping the globe (and particularly the design community). Our design team are avid pinners, and there’s no question why. Pinterest is an easy-to-use image sharing, virtual pinboard site, which functions a bit like Facebook, and Flickr and all the others, but is totally different. They have an app (of course) and a bookmarklet which lets you easily pin any image or video from any website (except Facebook funnily enough, although there is away round that) onto any of your pinboards you like. Social interaction occurs loosely by allowing users to “follow” others’ boards and comment on, or like individual pins.  

Keeping moodboards and inspirational images on a per-project basis, or general design inspiration at our fingertips is beneficial and time-saving. Not to mention a TON of fun and SO much more addictive than Facebook. 

A nice feature I’d like to focus on for this blog (because it’s quite topical at the moment of course) is the copyright/crediting system. Pinterest asks that you credit your sources, which is good etiquette online anyway. But then they go one step further and do it for you. If you repin something from another person, it credits that person you repined from, and if you pin something from a website, it retains the link to that website. Very clever. It means that when I go back through my pins and think “now where on earth was that super-awesome thing from”, I just click and go. Easy Peasy (Lemon Squeezy). 

In its fairly limited infant stage, Pinterest reduces the noise, lets users focus on the core purpose of the site: finding and organising beautiful images. And it is refreshingly devoid of advertising and obnoxious branding for the moment. Some basic flaws in the user interface can be overlooked for now, and apart from these minor issues, Pinterest is an absolute pleasure to use. Even when they serve up a 502 error, they make you smile “Our server is experiencing a mild case of the hiccups. We've reported it to the team.” Good to know. 

As it grows, surely there will be continually more functionality added. Already it hints at being an effective online shopping space centered around user interests as opposed to paid advertising, but my hope is that it doesn’t go the way of Facebook and get messy and over-commercialised.

You can follow me on Pinterest here, don't worry, I don't bite :)