Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you’ll have heard of Pinterest, latest ‘flavour of the month’ in the unending avalanche of new social networking sites hoping to cash in on the success of FacePuke et al. Basically, it’s a site that allows you to gather together collections of images and videos from around the intarwebs and ‘pin’ them onto ‘pinboards’ for future reference. The obligatory bolted-on “social networking” allows you to ‘follow’ other people’s boards --though why the feck you’d want to do so is beyond me.

Anyway, dutiful nerd that I am, I checked out Pinterest a while back [I dinnae like new things to be happening on that there intarwebs thing, without sticking my beak in to see what’s going on]. What I found there had me immediately file under ‘Pointless Crap’. With apologies to intelligent females everywhere, the place seemed to be full of vacant bints posting pictures of shoes, or Hugh Laurie as Dr. House.

Then, a few weeks back, through the medium of Twitter, one of my ex-students mentioned a board he’d set up on Pinterest to collect his favourite movie quotes together. Shortly after that, another mentioned that he was using Pinterest to gather together design inspiration images. So, thanks to Rob and Karl, [for t’was they], I had a bit of a re-think about Pinterest. After all, scrape away the pointless social networking crud and underneath lies a pretty efficient means of collating visual material from around the internet in one place. Could Pinterest be an alternative to the various YouTube playlists, folders of images on my various comps and bookmarks I’ve collected over the years?

I returned to Pinterest to give it a proper run out and it is actually a really useful tool for those of us of an artistic or designery bent. Ignore the aforementioned social networking drivel and it works pretty nicely as an online scrapbook for your design inspirations or visual reference materials.

Some of my boards:

Warning: I recently introduced Alex to the joys of Pinterest and she’s been hammering the bugger solid for about the past two weeks. I apologise in advance if the fallout from this lands upon the heads of you, my dear students. I knew not the terror I might be unleashing!