How to make online scrapbooks

As long as I’ve been a designer, I’ve tried to keep scrapbooks and scraps of things I like, find inspiring or just want to keep for future reference. Here’s a quick guide to how I’ve set up some online ones.

The old way

The trouble with traditional scrapbooks (or collections of any kind) is they take time to maintain and fiddle about with sticking things in or clipping them together. Then, you’ve got to carry them around and keep them with you for them to be of any use at the moment you need them. Sometimes, the thing you remember putting in ages ago can prove hard to find when you come around to needing it.

The new way

As with a lot of things the digital age is helping with this problem. More specifically, the blogging age is helping. Blogs make it incredibly easy to gather images, thoughts or things you find on the web together in one place – effectively making online scrapbooks.

The best tools

Most designers combine their main blog (where they write about design) with a scrapbook of some kind, but I decided to keep mine separate when I discovered websites like Posterous and Tumblr a few months ago.

These are free and hosted blogging platforms just like Wordpress, or Blogger. I chose Posterous as I liked how easy it was to post content to it, but from what I can gather Tumblr is very similar.

How it works

Once you have set up a blog on Posterous, the simplicity of adding to your scrapbook is as easy this: just email a picture or a piece of text to an address and then it appears. This is incredibly useful whenever I come across a picture or quote on the web I want to keep for future reference – I just grab the link to the image or page and email that off with a few notes of my own. It’s that simple. No logging in, or editing required (unless you want to).

My scrapbooks

For the last few months I’ve been adding to my own Posterous scrapbook for pictures of things I like or I’m inspired by. This includes all kinds of design, photography, architecture and much more:

I’ve also started a blog for quotes that I find or come across. These range from design quotes to just about anything I find interesting and inspiring:

These are both filling up nicely and I especially like the fact that they are searchable, tagged and visible to the world so people (such as clients) can see what inspires me. I’m also glad I decided to keep them separate to this blog, as it keeps things a little bit cleaner and easier to find.

I still find I need to keep some physical reference material though (such as examples of nice print finishings) but using online blogs means I’m keeping more inspiring material than I did before.

Feel free to take a look around my visual or quote blogs, or share what I’ve posted with your own network. Look out for the occasional roundup on this blog too, showing some of the highlights of what I’ve added to them.