Interior design is truly an art. You are decorating and designing a person’s home for the next several years. You’re furnishing the place where they will sleep, lounge, shower, cook, and essentially live. It is no small feat and should be taken with the utmost precision and discussion. 

Assigned with such a significant task, one might initially be overwhelmed, not merely with the job but with the vast expanse of designing options. These options come with several critical concerns.

One of these is budgeting. Large interior design projects with both aesthetics and functionality may not always come with liberal funds.

Themes and color schemes can be difficult to design when limitations are placed by such limited funds. It can be complicated to create visually appealing rooms with the added difficulties of equipping a space with utility and durability for the sake of the most important quality: user satisfaction. 

And yet, user satisfaction and the solutions to all of these concerns can be somewhat alleviated by the smart use of new data in our increasingly technological world. Pinterest, a powerful social media application, proves to be extremely helpful for the work of interior designers. This image-based platform allows for someone to organise aesthetic ideas for decorative interior designs, to view the ideas of others, to gain inspiration, and to also upload worthy final products. 

Pinterest for Interior Designers

For a social media platform to assist interior designers to the extent mentioned above, it is important to understand how Pinterest can best be used for interior designers. Here are some suggestions for interior designers who want to draw valuable inspiration from Pinterest:

Create an Account

Create a Pinterest account. You’ll be required to include your email address, a password, and age. It’s critical that you take note of this information and use a professional username for your company.

Once created, a Pinterest account allows access to the account including suggestions in your feed, important pins, and creative boards for inspiration.

Search the Content

Brainstorm inspiring ideas and search for your clients in the bar located at the top of the page. Pinterest has images of color schemes, gorgeous houses and apartments, room decorations, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and etc.

There are modern, bohemian, vintage, and every theme in between images on Pinterest. The search can depend on what you as the designer is looking for, as well as what the home-owner is looking for.

For example, if you’re designing a home for a family with a child, you might account for an exciting theme they might ask for like space for their four-year-old future astronaut. Once words are entered and searched for through the search bar, Pinterest allows you to find various images of all of these designs and make more well-informed decisions.

Pin Pictures

Pin the images you would consider to be relevant to your projects. If certain images are appealing and are being considered to use either for inspiration or to look into a similar product, it can be saved as a pin to a board.

If you’ve found the perfect example of a bedroom with moon and star decorations for a contractor’s child, this would be worthy of a pin as everything from the colours to the layout to the furniture to the decorations might be useful in your own design. 

Make Boards

Create boards for the pins. Using boards creates the illusion that someone is pinning down these designed images with push pins on a cork board. Doing so electronically allows you to freely select more sources of inspiration and organise them in a more orderly fashion.

When an image is pinned, Pinterest gives the option to include the image in a board with an overarching title. This allows you to separate the images in an outline, making it easier to decide how you might like your own design to look.

Going back to the family example, an image of the child’s bedroom might go into a board labeled Johnny’s bedroom. You can separate images into different boards for each room or section of the house. 

Find Inspiration

Use the various sources of inspiration to complete your own original interior design. If you like specific pieces or designs on Pinterest, you may replicate some of them with your own products in real life.

If you and the client really like the moon-shaped overhead for the bed frame, it can be found at a local store, an online shop, or carved out of wood. If you want to add your own twist to a design with different furniture or a different look, you can go ahead and do so while keeping the budget in mind.

If instead of stars on the bed sheets, the client wanted to add stars surrounding the moon-shaped overhead carved from the same wood, you would be able to do so from the Pinterest-inspired image with wood left-over from the moon-shape.

The final result would be more original and also fairly economical.

Include Your Own Work

When the creation has been finished, Pinterest also allows designers to create their own pins and an interior designer or really anyone has the option of uploading their own design.

As a social media platform, Pinterest is a visually creative outlet and as an interior designer, many designs hold value for others looking to create similar designs.

If the design has been completed and it is permitted by the contractor, you can then create your own pin with an image of the beautiful, final interior design. This image can go on to inspire other designers in their own designing processes.

Refine Searches

Overtime, as you become more familiar with the Pinterest platform and refines your word search through more projects, sources of inspiration and more creative ideas can only grow.

As ideas grow, Pinterest will growa through the reception and circulation of added pins and increasing ingenuity. Be sure to have fun with the design search process and the design itself!

Pinterest is a social media platform to share and absorb new ideas; it is imperative that interior designers take advantage of it. At this point, images in the feed will naturally alter themselves by a Pinterest algorithm to be related to what has been searched as it changes.

After looking for design information, the feed will be filled with inspiring interior designs. If one catches your designer’s eye, you can easily pin it for later and consider it in the next design.

It’s not often we post a four-minute Photoshop tutorial with the power to prevent all kinds of frustration, but that’s what you’ll learn in the video below. In fact one highly respected pro insists “this tip saved my sanity,” and it could do the same for you.

Matt Kloskowski is a Photoshop/Lightroom specialist who says his mission is “to create straightforward tutorials that help you get the results you’ve always wanted.” And that’s a pretty good description for what you’ll learn today.

Kloskowski begins this Photoshop lesson with a question: “How many times have you gone up to the File menu and clicked on Save or Save As, thinking the image will be saved to your computer?” But then you’re greeted with the dialogue box in the first photo below.

The problem occurs if you’re not paying close attention. So you click on the Save button, and the image is unwittingly saved to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Then you search for the photo on your computer, and it’s nowhere to be found. As you might imagine, this can drive you nuts and waste a lot of tome.

Adobe made this change in 2020, and it’s responsible for a lot of frustration. Fortunately there’s a quick solution for making certain this never happens again. All you have to do is navigate to Photoshop’s Preferences panel and change the default Save location from Creative Cloud to On Your Computer.

Kloskowski offers a bonus tip that also involves a quick Preferences change. This one comes in handy when you wish to save an image you’ve edited and saved in the past, but this time you want to switch the file format—perhaps to JPEG for online use. It’s just as quick and easy to do as the sanity-saving tip mentioned above.

We really suggest that you learn these two tricks, and jot down a couple notes for future reference. After all, no one wants to go insane, right?

You can find more helpful tips like these by taking a look at Kloskowski’s popular YouTube channel, so be sure to pay a visit and subscribe.

We also recommend you check out the helpful tutorial we posted recently, explaining how to use another Photoshop tool that delivers awesome color with ease.