March 2012 - Five Random Faves (Part 1)

Fave #1: Pin it with Pinterest!

Our 'At Home with Mirabelle' pinboard

Hey guys, there's this new(-ish) internet gadget in town called Pinterest! It is the wannabe aesthete's best friend, and anyone who's anyone has a Pinterest account, even our sister site Mirabelle Design Inspiration! And even La Baguette has garnered a fan base. Wow, so tell us more about that new kid on the block...

Pinterest is basically a giant worldwide visual pinboard fed through by its members. Individually each user has total control over which visuals they wish to pin and collate and organise into their own pinboards. You can add to the existing feeds content by adding brand new photographic material to it, whether your very own or from other sources. The easy user interface enables in principle to trace back to the origins of every source, copyrighted or otherwise, although it is alleged that image stock companies and Flickr have expressed concerns.

Some of Mirabelle Design Inspiration's boards

Check our easy-peasy tutorial. Once you've registered with the cool clique at Palo Alto and installed the all-essential 'Pin It' button upon your tool bar, the protocol is simple: everytime you come across a picture (or video even) of interest to you, whether content-wise or style-wise or otherwise, you click the 'Pin It' button and Bob's your uncle! You organise your virtual pins onto virtual pinboards, according to topic, genre, style etc. and you end up creating photographic mood boards, colour palettes and visual mosaics that can literally take your breath away!

As explained above, you have the facility to repin existing pins from other members directly off the user activity stream. Believe you me, repinning is very tempting indeed, and like the rest of the Pinterest experience, a very addictive activity, you have been warned! You can choose to 'Like' pictures if you wish and those likes will in turn be organised onto a pinboard.

If you haven't yet given Pinterest a try, why wait any longer? It is nothing like hard work, it is fun, inspiring, and there will always be that image somewhere that will make you smile, or make you go weak at the knee! Complete feelgood therapy! (to be continued)