Articles · Design
The references we save and never open again
Twenty-plus boards, and still I start every project by searching from scratch. How to collect references you can actually pull back out.
Translated from the Korean original. Read in Korean
My Pinterest boards passed twenty. Twelve bookmark folders. I stopped counting my saved posts on Instagram.
And yet when I actually start a poster, I search from scratch. I've collected so much, and none of it is usable.
For a while I thought it was because I was lazy. I hadn't organized, hadn't tagged. But organizing didn't change anything. The problem wasn't diligence. It was the way I collected.
The illusion of the save button
Hitting save feels good. It feels like you've grabbed something useful.
What you actually get in that moment is just a feeling that you might use it someday. The image goes somewhere hard to pull it back out of, because the me who saves and the me who searches use different words.
When I save, I file it as "pretty poster". When I search, I'm looking for "vertical editorial layout with lots of white space". The words going in and the words coming out don't match, so of course nothing turns up.
On top of that, I never note why I saved something. Six months later I can't remember what was good about it. The color? The white space? The typeface? A reference that's lost its reason is just a nice picture.
One word for why
Every attempt at perfect categorization failed. With twenty folders, I'd agonize over where something belonged and end up not saving it at all.
So I changed the method. Each image gets just one reason it was saved. White space, grid, color pairing, texture, font pairing, tone of copy. These are exactly the words that come to mind later when I go looking.
On Pinterest, just renaming boards is enough. Boards split by medium, like "Posters" or "Web design", only grow and never get opened. Boards split by reason, like "Great white space" or "Holds up with two colors", actually get opened during work.
Images and addresses are different things
It took me a long time to realize I'd been mixing two completely different things in one folder.
Image references should be collected in bulk and found by tag. Pinterest, Savee and Are.na are built to do exactly that.
Site addresses, on the other hand, should be few and always in the same place. Where to get fonts, where to get icons, where to make palettes. Twenty is plenty, and what matters is opening those twenty the same way every time.
That side turned out to be what ate the most time. Searching for the same font site's address every time, finding that the mockup site I saved years ago had lost its domain. That inconvenience is, in the end, why I made this site. Sites are split by field, like UI/UX and Graphic & Branding, and dead links get removed.
Collecting and using
If you treat everyday collecting and searching during a project as the same job, neither works.
Day to day, I collect wide and shallow. Whatever I see on the commute gets tossed into one place without sorting. Try to organize at this stage too and you'll get tired and give up.
When a project starts, I go narrow and deep. I don't pick from what I've stored; I search fresh. I make one project folder and gather around twenty references just for this job. The accumulated boards are only a starting point.
Collecting references fresh for each project is normal.
Trying to build a library for life is what makes collecting feel heavy. What lasts isn't the images but the criteria you used to choose them.
What you learn by throwing things away
The best way to organize what I'd collected turned out to be throwing it away. Once a month, for ten minutes, I open a board and ask whether each image still looks good. If not, it goes.
As you delete, patterns appear. What you keep saving, which way your taste leans, where you'd been following someone else's work too closely. That's probably the biggest thing you get from collecting references. One sentence like "I like asymmetric layouts with big white space" changes your work more than five hundred images.
The next step is writing down, in a sentence, why something looks good. "The photo sits in the top two-thirds and the bottom is left empty, so the eye drops to the title." If you can put the reason into words, you can carry the principle to other material. If you can't, you only borrow the shape.
I wrote a little more about finding those words in Putting "make it feel right" into words.