Tuesday, February 7, 2012

How Pinterest Changed the Way I Design

The internet has done wonders for my ability to research my designs. While I have a good many reference books for historical costumes, I usually don't need to pull them out any more. Now I can just go do a Google Image search for whatever I'm looking for, and pages of photos appear in a heartbeat! But even with the convienence that Google offers, I would still spend hours copying the images to my hard drive, sorting through them, and spend even more valuable ink printing out the photos into a collage to share with my director.

Until I found Pinterest.

In case you haven't heard about this site, or have just been ignoring it, I'll explain it as simply as possible. It's a social bookmarking site that uses images instead of links. Or as I like to think of it, a web-based bulletin board. Which is what the name suggests - you're on the internet, you see something you like, and you hit a button to "pin" it onto your account. And you can create different "boards" to divide your images into various ideas or interests.

For me, this is a perfect way to collect my thoughts when I'm researching on the web. Now when I find an image that inspires me, or is a good reference for my costume design, I hit the "pin it" button on my browser's toolbar and write a little note reminding myself why I picked it, and then off it goes onto my Pinterest account where I can find it all in one place when I'm done and ready to do my renderings. I make a different board for each show, and if I want I can even add the production photos later on to compare my original thoughts with the final product. And my favorite part is that I can share those boards with a web link so my director and the production staff can see my ideas and even comment on them!

I've only started to do one show using this tool, but I'm really excited about the potential this site has to make my job easier and more productive. If you want to see what I'm working on, you can find my boards at http://pinterest.com/kmfachet/. And don't forget to click the red "follow me" button the right of this page!