** A Mood Board Tool for People Who Can't Do Pinterest
What happens when you try to use Pinterest for concept work
Pinterest is, for all intents and purposes, a wonderful amalgamation of imagery. But use it for concept work and you quickly discover the catch: you end up part of a group of people driving down the same avenue, feeding the same algorithm, landing in the same category.
The site is built to keep you engaged and keep you in the environment, so you end up in a pre-curated one. And so much of an architect's or designer's process is the opposite: processing information and making design-driven decisions in an environment that is free of weighting, where nothing has been ranked for you in advance. When the field is weightless, you get to decide what carries weight. You get to explore without being locked into someone else's map.
At the conceptual stage, the algorithm regurgitates everything into the same essentialist aesthetic, and you struggle to find options and ideas outside the thing it has learned you like. Look past the first layer and you realise you're stuck in the regurgitation machine. And with the rise of AI, the search terms now fill with AI-generated renders and conceptual imagery too — more of the same, faster.
That's the moment I close the tab.
Why the instinct is to reach for a book
My instinct leads me back to physical books, sketches, and photographs, because a magazine and a book do something a pin never can.
When I pick up a book, I'm immediately exposed to a set of designs curated by an editor around a topic, and the topic is almost always broader than my search term. That breadth is the whole point. Pinterest pinpoints my creative exploration into a narrow band of content. A book widens it.
This is creativity by association. I might page through a book about wood while thinking about a countertop for a phone-accessory display in a store. The book isn't about my problem at all, but the associations it triggers across architecture, city planning, furniture, fixtures, and features are what end up engaging, rewarding, and inspiring the design of that display.
How we actually run through a concept
When we start a real project, we turn to a wall of books. First stop is often our DAAB titles, books that resonate because each one addresses a single topic: lobby design, bar design, spa design, club design, wood, furniture, shop design, door design, hotel design, contemporary fashion photography, event design, high-tech architecture. Each is built around an industry segment, a material, or a function.
The workflow from there:
Write down your thoughts first. Before any searching, get the thinking out of your head and onto paper.
Research in books. Browse by association, not by keyword. If there's a website reference for a project that catches us, we'll look it up; otherwise we photograph the page on a phone or scan it.
Search digitally, but not through Pinterest.
For that third step, we use Are.na. The first board I built there was for a client who wanted a futuristic store.
What makes Are.na work for concept is that nothing is weighted above anything else. Everything arrives in the same square: a URL, a book reference, an image, all the same size, none given more or less prominence. There's no algorithm, no ads, no gated metrics. And the absence of those things changes the output: the images we find and use are images you wouldn't find on Pinterest. Presented in a mood board, they strike a different chord. They feed the client's soul, because they're seeing things they haven't seen elsewhere, and that stays in your head. It isn't the same regurgitative slop.
From mood board to model
Once we've gathered the references in Are.na, we take some of that 2D imagery into SketchUp and model several ideas against it. Those get presented as multiple options through LayOut, Affinity Designer, or Canva, with D5 and V-Ray for the rendered views.
In the studio we might have many variations at that point, but we bring it back to the Malcolm Gladwell rule of three: three options, three designs, three variations. Enough that the choice isn't overwhelming, and each of the three strong enough to stand on its own and give the client something real to choose between.
The handover moment from mood board to model is when the client has lived with those three and says: two of these, I like, take them out and show me the variations. And within those variations we ask the practical questions. Do they offer buildable solutions? Could we take them to a shop vendor and manufacture the items?
Where Are.na frustrates us, and why Pinterest still exists
Honest trade-off: Are.na's low functionality is also what makes it hard to search sometimes. Go through the help, the FAQ, the about page, or the roadmap and you'll notice a lot of what you're hoping for simply isn't in development yet. So the features you expect aren't always there, and the wait for them is long. It's a selective environment.
Pinterest, by contrast, is so wildly used that it has everything, and there's a reason to start there for the broadest, fastest sweep. But for concept work, the order matters. So the three rules we work by:
Start by writing down your thoughts.
Research in books.
Search digitally, but not through Pinterest.
The reader has no algorithm, no ads, no gates and metrics. That absence is exactly the point.
For questions, email info@studiojdb.com.
The Studio JDB Book Wall
