How do you use Pinterest?

Using Pinterest is simple - you either create your own pins (which is comprised of an image or video, a link to the source if applicable, a description, and tags), or search for pins, and save them. You can save pins either to your profile (which appears as Unorganized Ideas), or to a board. What you do with the board is wholly up to you. For me, I use Pinterest to create inspiration boards, mood boards, stuff like that. I have a board I've kept for a couple years now that I still maintain, Dripstiny, that was meant to be an inspiration board for this art project I was working on by the same name - I drew the various characters of Destiny (and some player characters) all dressed to the nines for a "Dawning Gala", some fictional event to coincide the actual in-game holiday event, the Dawning. The board of over 800+ pins is mostly comprised of dozens of creations by numerous fashion designers, categorized based on color and motifs that allude to the various subclasses in Destiny 2.

However, you don't need a gazillion pins to make a good board, far from it!

Fundamentally, what makes a good Pinterest board is that the pins in the board are used convey some kind of idea. The idea doesn't need to be abstract - a board with "vegan dinner ideas" may have a combination of pins for various vegan recipes, or maybe food combinations that sound good. But the idea also can be abstract - character inspiration boards are a good example of this, something that doesn't necessarily convey literally about the character (though it can - my own character boards do both as both inspire me), but rather it alludes to the idea of the character, their aesthetics, their ideals - the idea of them.

Let's look back at the funny Dripstiny board again. When I created the board, the intention I had in mind was that other artists, creators, et cetera, could imagine their own Guardians, or other characters I didn't cover, all dressed up and shit. As such, there were two goals this board had to hit:

• Represent all of the subclasses in the game (at least, at the time I played) - the powers of Light and Dark, as well as Light and Dark itself.
• Cover a wide range of different styles and tastes.

And it's these goals that create the idea of the board: "Your Guardian's going to some party, what are they gonna wear?"

And again, it doesn't necessarily have to be that convoluted, it can really be as something as simple as "I wanna add more protein to my diet, what are some good recipes for that?", or "I gotta create a new character for this DnD session my friends wanna start having, this board's for theorycrafting this character". Even dumb shit (affectionate) like "this board has cool bugs I like" is a solid idea to work off of.

Searching for Inspo

When it comes to making a new board, it can be pretty daunting figuring out where to start. It's unfortunately something that's a little too open-ended for me to really give any advice on, outside of just finding stuff that's relevant to the core idea of the board and going from there. Sometimes the Pinterest search function can be a crapshoot, as is the main home page dashboard - the best place for finding good pins is to take whatever relevant pins you already have and scrolling down to see any relevant pins. This is especially applicable for niche topics - finding good pins for plus size fashion feels herculean, even with the added Body Types option (not to mention the option explicitly excluding masculine bodies, but that's a topic for another day).

One of the neat things about Pinterest is that it's not just pins you can search for - you can search for boards and accounts (as well as videos, and products for some reason). Going through boards other people have made can really help with figuring out how to go about creating your own boards. You can even follow boards and accounts, though as far as I can tell it doesn't really do much of anything besides having a list of people you follow on your account to go back to (I believe it's supposed to send you e-mail notifications when they create new pins or add them to the boards, but I never received anything, so your guess is as good as mine).