Why We Love Pinterest

If you ask ten people to define Pinterest, you’ll likely get four different responses. Digital scrapbooking tool, visual social network, image discovery tool, image bookmarking tool. We say it’s all of those things, and it’s one of the reasons we love it so damn much. Pinterest was founded in 2010 by Ben Silbermann (who is the current CEO), Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp.

The company currently has around 500 employees and is one of the 50 most visited sites in the world.

At Shape we absolutely love Pinterest. We frequently use it for inspiration during the brainstorming and design phases of a new project and find that it really helps us to get the creative juices flowing. Sure there are loads of other design inspiration sites out there, but none of them are as big and as varied as Pinterest.

When using Pinterest, we come across images from a range of design disciplines (interior design, UX design, typography, illustration) and it’s this smorgasbord of visual eye candy that really helps us come up with novel and truly unique designs and solutions.

Pinterest’s current tagline is “discover and save creative ideas” and we really think it accurately summarises a lot of what sets Pinterest apart from, say, Google Images. Google Images is really focused around search and thus you really need to have some sort of idea of what you are looking for in order to get any use out of it.

But the way Pinterest behaves allows us to stumble into amazing Pinterest boards with images that inspire, thrill and excite us that we would have probably never come across through traditional search.

There are also a tonne of little things about Pinterest that when added together make a big difference. Most of these are the really thoughtful design elements such as the fact that when you click on an image in a feed you can click anywhere else on the screen and it takes you back to the feed.

This lets us cycle through loads of images quickly without them opening in new tabs or us having to click the back button constantly. Another thing we love is the ability to “pin” and “heart” images straight from the feed without having to open the image up in order to do so. When we’re on a pinning spree this one less click each time makes for a much more pleasant experience.

Pinterest is the world’s biggest creative image bank which gets all the little things right and we love it.