You’ve no doubt heard of Pinterest. After all, over 100 million users flood the site with images of everything under the sun. A common misconception is that Pinterest is a site mainly for women who want to curate images of home decor or wedding ideas. While it may be true that Pinterest is a great tool for these purposes, it’s also true that Pinterest can be a fantastic inspiration tool for designers and animators.
Don’t believe us? Just ask famed mo-graph designer GMUNK. He’s talked in the past about how he uses Pinterest to keep track of inspiration for his work. His profile on the site has over 8,000 pins, 23 different boards with themes like geometry, typography, and photography, and he’s got over 15,000 followers who look to his pins for inspiration of their own.
In his interview, GMUNK mentioned that he loved Pinterest stating, “It makes me so happy to spend so much time collecting and expressing my taste, and it makes me so happy to be able to make that public and to share with people.” He went on to say that when he gets a brief,
“It’s so easy to hit the ground running when you can fire up your Pinterest boards and it’s just there. It’s so quick, it’s a nice interface, and it’s a wonderful tool.”
So, if it’s good enough for GMUNK, maybe it’s good enough for you too. Here are some tips and tricks to using Pinterest to organize your inspiration and where to find it on Pinterest.
Getting Started
First things first. You’ll want to sign up for a free Pinterest account if you haven’t already. Just go to Pinterest.com to sign up. They claim it only takes 15 seconds, so hop to it. After you put in your initial information, Pinterest lets you pick 5 or more categories for your main feed. Good starter categories include Design, Art, Photography, and Drawings. But more specifically, you can search for topics like Animation, 3D Animation, Motion Graphics, and Motion Design. Pick what works best for you just as a jumping-off point.
Just like that, you’ll have a full feed of images and ideas that you might find inspiring.
Pro Tip: Some images will have a small “GIF” icon in the corner. These are animated gifs that can be played by clicking the icon.
Once you find an image you like, simply click the large “Pin It” icon to add it to a board.
Creating Boards
When you first start pinning, you won’t have any boards, so the pop-up window will prompt you to create one. Save your pin to a board that you created, and there it will live for you to peek at whenever you choose.
You can also create blank boards by clicking on your profile name in the upper right corner. This will take you to your profile with all of your stats and boards. Just click “Create A Board” to make a new board. You can even click “Create A Secret Board” for those times that you are working on something sensitive and you don’t want the world to see.
One of the best parts of Pinterest is the public nature of the boards, so we encourage you to share your boards whenever possible. It just makes the whole experience better for everyone.
Finding Pins
This is where the fun really begins and where inspiration strikes. There are lots of ways to add pins to your boards. First off, you can pin images from around the web in a variety of ways. Images from many sites can be saved to Pinterest through share buttons that the site houses.
For example, by clicking Share on a Shot on Dribbble, you’ll get an option to share to Pinterest. If you are signed into your Pinterest account, you’ll get a nice pop-up that allows you to add boards or pick where you want to save your pin.
There are also several Pinterest browser extensions that make it even easier to save pins on any image you find around the web, even when share buttons aren’t available.
But aside from things you stumble across around the web, Pinterest already has a vast collection of great inspiration that you can find on the site and save to your own boards.
First off, try following some of your favorite artists. We already mentioned GMUNK, but many other great artists and dedicated design and animation resources use Pinterest on a regular basis. Check out Animator’s Resource for technical animation pins. And designer Lázaro Mendoza has nearly 60,000 pins and 11,600 followers.
Once you follow the profiles that you find interesting, try digging deeper with the Pinterest search functions. By typing a simple search like “mograph” you’ll get a wealth of inspiration, but Pinterest helps sort through the madness with popular filters. A bank of icons will show you filter options like “C4D”, “Inspiration”, and “Text”. Now you can see popular pins for just mograph text, and pin what you like to your own board.
Sharing
Another great function of Pinterest is the sharing options. Not only can you make public boards, you can also share entire boards with people via email and links. This can be super useful if you need to share your thoughts and ideas with a team or with clients for review.
You can actually use Pinterest as an online mood board that will help everyone stay on the same page. Others can have access to your boards and you can even invite them to edit and add to a board if you’d like.
Just like GMUNK and many others, Pinterest may be the perfect resource for finding and saving inspiration. It can be a great tool for getting a quick start on a new project, and even a place to share some of your own creations for others to admire and gain inspiration from. Hop on and see what a wide resource it really is.
