Do you ever go on a website and see the best designs, only to forget where you’ve seen them by the next day or lose the site for good in the massive list of bookmarked sites you’ve got on your computer? We understand. Bookmarking is a great idea but if you like lots of graphic design websites, some of the best ones can get lost in your list. That’s why Pinterest is so great for designers.

What is Pinterest

At its basic level Pinterest is a very good looking pin board where you can share your favorite images and ideas from the Web. It’s somwhere you can organise and categorise photos, cartoons and designs that you see while your surfing around for design inspiration. So far they have nearly 5 million followers and are growing fast.

Why is Pinterest great for designers?

It’s a great place to showcase your taste, your aspirational ideas and most importantly your own website. You don’t want to be a bore and over promote yourself but keeping a folder especially for your own designs or throwing your designs into relevant folders is a great idea. To optimize your Pinterest account, make sure you include your business name in the ‘About’ section of the profile and if possible, make it your usename. Also, add your website URL to your profile

Catergory suggestions for Pinterest folders:

Print Design – perfect place to put eye-catching and stylish movie posters, album or ebook covers, gig posters or any other kind of print you should see on your daily Internet surf.

Typography & Calligraphy – When you see perfect fonts or kerning or any kind of typography that you know will turn heads or that you could use in the future, Pin it!

Logos -  As you know, you will find excellent logos everywhere BUT don’t be dull and just do a folder on ‘favorite logos‘, find a niche. You could do funny logos, strange logo or even something even more specific and random, like unusual road signs.

What’s right with it?

Getting involved with pinning and repinning design images means plenty of inspiration to help you create new, original designs. It also acts as a bank for visual research and bookmarking. It has a really effective search mechanism placed prominently in the top right hand corner. If you want your images to be found in that search by others, make sure you are tagging it with all the relevant keywords associated with the image. Don’t forget if they click on it, they could end up perusing your website which is great for your traffic increase.

What’s wrong with it?

With all your friends collection of ecclectic images clashed all over the main page, it can be a bit overwhelming. Similar to the twitter feed you can have an information overload. However, like hashtags on twitter that search mechanism comes in handy to cut it down to see images in the category you desire. Also, certain big websites such as facebook, won’t let you pin pictures from there to your Pinterest. But there again, it would be an awful bore to have all your images coming from facebook.

Although it’s inspiring, it is not really possible to use it as a mood board tool yet. You can’t move images around within your folder. Once they’re ‘pinned’ they will just move down the page as you post more images to that folder. Perhaps something for them to develop.

I know what you’re going to say – very pinteresting, right?