As I've mentioned here before I am a little obsessed with Pinterest, a site where you can share beautiful images and create wonderful visual moodboards. A few months ago I got an email from the lovely ladies of Pinterest asking me if I would write a blog post about why I love pinterest and how I use it. This week the post appeared on their lovely blog over here and you can check out why I love Pinterest here:
Hello fellow pinners! My name is Donal and I’m a Pinterest addict. It started small, a nice book case idea for the living room, some tasty supper inspiration and a big dirty chocolate cake. It quickly spiraled, I found myself adding new boards, pinning when I couldn’t sleep, and noting DIY projects I HAD to do! You see for someone who’s life revolves around food, Pinterest creates a non stop source of delicious inspiration. Alongside plenty of travel, eating out and trawling through cookbooks and food magazines, I have now planted Pinterest firmly in my heart as a truly brilliant source for new ideas.
Apart from the general drooling I do on Pinterest on any given day, it also has realistic functions I now use in my day to day work. In the process of writing cookbooks, one of the things I have always done is to create moodboards to demonstrate the direction I want to take the book, from photography, fonts, jacket design and colour scheme. Doing this allows me to show a publisher or designer quite clearly what I’m hoping to achieve. It’s a super way to open the discussion on artistic direction and since Pinterest started, I no longer have to create these moodboards in photoshop. I simply create a board, pin the images I like and then invite them to the board. Really simple and very effective.
While we shoot, I also keep these Pinterest boards close by to make sure we are keeping to the direction we agreed upon. Now, anytime I have a new project or even a smidgen of a new idea, I start a board and shovel a whole pile of related pins into it, sometimes they take me somewhere, sometimes they don’t but either way I love doing it and it’s a great way to clear my head!
I actually got the idea to start my online food magazine, FEAST: A Dinner Journal, through a board I created last year simply entitled FEAST, where I had been pinning images of epic meals and dinners. The more I pinned, the more I fleshed out the idea of a magazine that would travel across Ireland to visit the artisan producers behind each seasonal course, coming together to appear in one epic FEAST at the end. A few months later, I had an editor and designer on board and the first issue was born, going out to over 1.1 million people worldwide.
When I first started pinning what I really loved about it was that it created a space to save all these beautiful recipes ideas in one place and so I no longer had a long list of bookmarks in my browser. I am definitely what you could call a selfish pinner, I pin what I like and what I want to see again. One of my favourite boards I have on Pinterest is quite predictably my Food board, it has the most pins, and I love just scrolling through it for inspiration. But it’s not just food, I love a bit of DIY and gardening and this summer, I built a cool structure in my vegetable garden to grow beans up after spotting it on Pinterest. Plus, another pin inspired me to paint and decorate an old kitchen dresser I bought at auction. In fact, I even pinned the results!
There are a huge amount of incredibly inspiring pinners out there and I almost feel ashamed at how much repinning of their pins I do, but without people like, Marte Marie Forsberg, Mimi Thorisson, Sam at Petite Violette, Linda Lomelino, Bakers Royale, Caitlin Van Horn and Nicole Franzen the my Pinterest boards wouldn’t be half as beautiful as they are!