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As it’s the start of a brand new year, now is a better time than ever to start collecting ideas for how to revamp your home. Fresh year, fresh start! If you’ve tried collecting design ideas in the past but found it time-consuming and a little bit dull, then Pinterest really is about to become your new best friend…
Launched in 2010, the image bookmarking and sharing platform now has around 100 million monthly users. With over 5 million home décor pins being pinned to the site every day, you definitely won’t be short of design inspiration ever again!
In this post, we’ll discuss what Pinterest is and the best ways to use it for collecting home and interior ideas. We’ll share our tips and tricks on how to utilise all the great features the site has to offer to really get your creative juices flowing.
First Things First: What is Pinterest?
Putting it simply, Pinterest is like a virtual mood board. Like when cutting images from magazines, you can ‘pin’ ideas to various boards to gather ideas for different rooms. With Pinterest, you get the added bonus of having the world wide web at your fingertips. Don’t be put off by the term mood board though. Long gone are the days where mood boards were purely for designers and arty types! Pinterest makes it incredibly easy for you to make boards suited to your own style and taste. Your ideas will be flowing in no time.
Getting Started
It’s a pretty obvious one, but first of all you need to create an account. This is so you can log in and view all of your boards in one place. Now I will warn you, it will seem pretty daunting to start with; you’ll be met with a lonely page that is just longing to be filled with colourful and creative boards. But don’t panic, this is where the fun begins…
Creating a Board
So, you’re on Pinterest to gather ideas for your home interior. Start off by thinking what you are looking to work on. Is it your living room or dining area? Perhaps you are after a chair for a particular space or you are wondering whether a particular theme would work in your home.
Basing the board on a room is good for seeing how particular pieces will look with each other. Basing your boards on a theme will open up a whole spectrum of pins and ideas. Starting off with a room is a good place to start; you can always be more specific with individual pieces and accessories later on.
Finding Pins
Now you’ve created your board, you just need something to go on it! Using the search bar at the top, you can type in terms that are relevant to your board. For example, I want to create a board to help me with ideas for my dining room. I know I want a modern look, so I’ll start by searching ‘modern dining chairs’. If you’ve got a better idea of the shape, style or colour of seat you’re after, that’s even better; just type this into the search bar.
A broader search is likely to give you loads of inspiration. However, it will offer up things that may not be what you are after. You can always amend your search terms when you have a better idea of what you’re looking for. Pinterest will also give its own search suggestions, so it’s worth seeing what they have to offer.
When looking for pins, you can also use Pinterest’s pre-defined categories for an even broader search. This can be found in between the search bar and your username along the top. Clicking a relevant category will give you a whole selection of pins to choose from and people to follow who are relevant in the industry. This is a great place to start when you are looking for people to follow who have similar tastes and interests to yourself.
When you follow someone on Pinterest, you’ll be able to see what they pin. That’s why it’s so key to find people that will really help inspire your own design ideas.
Pinning
Now for the important bit; the Pinning. To pin something to your board, simply hover over your selected image and the Pin It button will appear. When you click the Pin It button, you’ll get to choose which board you want to add your pin to; this is a feature that becomes much more useful the more boards you have to pick from!
And there you have it, you’ve pinned your first pin on Pinterest. The way you collect and gather your interior ideas and inspirations will never be the same again! And as you discover more pins and ideas, your boards will really begin to grow and truly flourish.
Here’s a quick snap of our recent board “Danetti Inspired By: Pantone Colour of the Year 2016” where we took inspiration from, you guessed it, the Pantone colour choice for 2016, which was Rose Quartz and Serenity:
You’ll notice that we have a whole range of pins here, not just furniture. It’s the shapes, colours and textures of the imagery combined that really helps bring a board together. Make sure you really look around to find pins that will give your board a truly stylish flair.
Now you’ve learnt the basics, here are our Top Tips for using Pinterest for home decor inspiration:
- Upload Your Own Images. Uploading imagery of existing furniture in your home is a great way to see how it will look alongside newer pieces and colours that you want to add to the scheme. Simply upload the image to your chosen board to see how well it works with the newer colours and pieces you wish to add to your space
- The Pin it button. The Pin it button allows you to take inspiration from literally all over the web. This small but powerful button sits in the top right corner of your browser window, letting you to pin images from other websites outside of the Pinterest platform. Just hover over the image you want to pin, click ‘pin it’ and choose the appropriate board. This is great when you are browsing a particular brand or company you know you are already interested in, as you can add their products to your board to see how it looks alongside other pieces. Or you can simply just pin the image to save it for future reference.
- Stay focused. There are millions of images on Pinterest, so it is very easy to start off looking for an Eames Dining Chair and end up pinning photos of cute kittens. Although you may stumble across new inspirations along the way, try to stick to what you actually want and keep all of your pins relevant to the board you’re pinning too.
- Sharing boards with others. When creating a board, you can invite others to collaborate with you. Share ideas by pinning pieces while also being inspired by what your collaborators find too.
- Follow the trail. The clever thing about Pinterest is that the pins themselves can clock up some serious mileage. They can be pinned over and over again by 1,000 of people. However, it’s always good to see where the pin is originally from. Usually, they will link to a website, perhaps a seller or blogger, so you may discover even more pieces like the one you pinned originally. You can also view ‘related pins’ whereby Pinterest suggests similar pins to the image you selected to help you find what you’re looking for- whether you know what that is or not!
- Take Pinterest on the go. Pinterest is also available on mobile, so download the app to get inspiration wherever you are. When you log in all of your boards will be available and the world of pinning will again be at your fingertips!
So there we have it, our guide on how to use Pinterest for home interior ideas. At Danetti, we regularly create boards based on things that inspire us, in order to help you create stunning settings in your home. Take a look at our Pinterest boards for some design inspiration for your own home and if you’d like to see our pins in your own feed, simply click the ‘follow button’: https://uk.pinterest.com/danetti/
For more help on getting started on Pinterest, view their help centre: https://help.pinterest.com/en/guide/all-about-pinterest
