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17 Jan 2015

Does Pinterest hold your interest?



I had been questing for a way to make my bookmarks work for me, for a long long time. Being a visual person has made looking at list upon list a big chore and with no picture clue, I would easily forget why I had bookmarked something in the first place.This was regardless of whether I had arranged the bookmarks into folders and subfolders. So when Pinterest came along, I was very curious to see if it would work as a visual bookmarking tool for me. This blog post will hopefully explain how I use Pinterest and how it works for me. 

As I have already mentioned, I use Pinterest mainly as a bookmarking tool, creating a humongous visual library for me to dip into whenever I feel the need. I am an artist, so I have created TONS of boards that suit my specific needs when researching something for a doodle commission or a crafty project. 

I absolutely adore vintage illustrations, so I have spent a lot of time collecting them from specific sources, the vast majority are in the public domain and available to use for any purpose. I have also included some sites where you can buy images too. I must stress that you should also check to see if the images are in fact in the public domain, just because it has been pinned, does not mean it is for use by anyone, always check! I think it is very important to pin from the source, I use reverse image search a lot, to make sure that I am pinning something from the original article/author/photographer. This will save you a lot of time when you need to go back and actually use the information that you have pinned. Don't get swayed by a lovely image, take the time to see that it isn't being pinned from the wrong place or worse, a spam filled horrible website. 

I am a big fan of 'How to Draw' tutorials, this saves a lot of time and stress, when you just can't get your head around drawing a particular thing. Using a combination of modern tutorials and vintage line drawings have proven to be excellent reference material. They are also helpful tools for anyone to use and people seem to like those pins a lot. If it encourages more people to draw, then that is very cool.


I would say that the next biggest thing I pin is craft tutorials, some very specific to what I already like and some that I hope to do eventually! As with any image, make sure that what you pin, actually leads back to the tutorial that you need! It is so frustrating if the pin leads to just a picture and not the actual tutorial. I also think if someone has gone to the effort of writing an awesome tutorial they deserve the credit. 

The rest of my pins are centred around blogging, tech tips and other social media articles I have found interesting. I do use Pinterest to pin my own artistic endeavours, but have not really invested much time in that yet. I also don't follow that many people either, as that can make your home feed very very noisy and pinterest is already very much like falling down the rabbit hole. I would definitely recommend being selective about who you follow and what boards you follow from that person, as people tend to be very eclectic on there ( I know I am). 




If you have any questions, please ask a question in the comments! I have recently started to look at what other people seem to find interesting about what I pin, from what I can gather the 'How to Draw' boards and anything with vintage illustrations are proving to be the most popular. I used a website called Tailwind to find out those stats, but I am looking into a few others sites, so will report back on which one I would recommend. 




Tools for using Pinterest more effectively
Various extensions and apps can greatly improve how useful Pinterest is to you, from using it on your PC and/or laptop to using it on your smartphone. 

ShotPin ~  A Chrome browser extension to make it easy to take a screenshot of any web page and then share it on Pinterest.

'Pin it' button works as a chrome extension (sorry non chromey like people), making life a lot easier, as you are browsing, allowing you to pin at will. For those tricky sites/articles that have no pinnable images, that is where ShotPin comes in handy. 

I currently have an iPhone 4S and use the Pinterest app quite a lot, it is very handy for browsing and pulling up reference material when I am out and about, away from my laptop or PC. I have found it to be very user friendly, pictures are displayed really nicely and and super easy to navigate. You can find it in the App Store




Recently the 'related pins' feature over on pinterest has been annoying, although it seems to have eased off on flooding my home feed at the moment.

Finally, I have been having a look at my latest statistics over on pinterest itself and it is rather interesting, as it proves if you pin interesting things, people like them, just not my actual website, whoops. 



After all this waffle, you may actually be curious to see what I pin over on Pinterest? I should warn you now, that it is a visual representation of my mind, which can at times be scary :)


Visit The Doodologist's profile on Pinterest.

2 comments:

  1. Never got to grips with pinterest, but seeing as you mentioned chrome extensions... Will take a look!

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    1. Don't blame me if you get lost on there! Will have to pin your website.

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