You’ve booked your planner and/or designer, and now they are asking for your Pinterest or other inspiration. You’re ready. You’ve had a wedding Pinterest for at least six years and you know it contains EVERY thought you’ve ever had about planning a wedding or elopement. You’re so excited to hear their point of view and see what they create from your concept. You do one final scroll through to make sure it fits your vibe, and as you go deeper, you realize that there is a lot here that a stranger might be confused about. The colors aren’t cohesive and some of the pins are really old. You start to wonder if this board will be helpful or give your planner the wrong idea about what you want.

If this is you, do not worry! We have put together a resource on what designers and planners are looking for when they look at your Pinterest board and ways you can clean it up to help them out. At the end of the day, a good designer is going to talk to you about your concept before diving into the aesthetics straight from your board. But if you want to elevate your Pinterest to be a great resource, here’s what you should think about...

WHAT PLANNERS/DESIGNERS ARE LOOKING FOR.

When we scroll through your Pinterest, we are looking for patterns in a few different avenues:

Organizational Story

How your pins are organized, how your brain thinks, and what ideas you have thought most about.

Color Story

What colors repeat, what tones from nature are reoccurring, what season is most featured.

Trend Story

What trends are repeating, what trends fade in and out, what are the most recent trends that have been pinned.

Valued Elements

What decor and thematic elements are repeatedly featured, what matters to you, what vendors will need to be brought in to support those elements.

Each of these stories tell us about your event and the type of ambiance you want to build. We look for the images that feel emotional and the ideas that keep repeating, showing that they mean something to you. 

Part of how we analyze these elements is by doing The Scroll. The Scroll is exactly what it sounds like, a scroll through your Pinterest board. But designers un-focus their eyes slightly and move at a steady pace so that they can take in the general themes rather than the specific details. These themes help them see the patterns of colors, elements, or trends that you are drawn to consistently. Of course, after executing The Scroll a couple of times, we will also look at the details and the repeating specific ideas that flow throughout your board. We will pull new inspiration from images that aren’t on your board but introduce those concepts in a new way.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO CURATE YOUR PINTEREST.

Commit to The Purge.

Pins that can detract from this process or confuse us about what you actually want include infographics that aren’t aesthetically related to your event or old pins that are no longer aligned with your vision. So if you’ve had a wedding board for the past ten years (we see you because we are you), we invite you to either delete any pins that no longer feel relevant for you or start a new board made of just the pins that speak to you today. Luckily, Pinterest’s mass-organization tool makes transferring pins from one board to another or mass-deleting pins pretty easy.

When doing this, think about the stories that designers look for: color, trend, organization, and elements. Ask yourself what story you want to tell and what things are crucial to convey. This will help you understand which pins are relevant to you today.

If you are a person who loves resource posts (aren’t we all?), think about putting those in a sub-folder that won’t detract from the aesthetics of your board. That way, you can reference them when you need to, but your main board will clearly translate the vibe that you want to prioritize.

In general, if a board is pretty large or older than six months, we tend to focus on the newest pins because they will be the most updated to your tastes and speak to current trends. So if you have specifically organized your board so that it will take us on a story as we scroll (I definitely have ordered my entire clothes inspo board into rainbow order), let us know! The more information you give us about how to approach your board, the better. We are here for the specificity and curation.

Do Your Own Scroll.

Look at your Pinterest from a designer’s point of view and try to see it from their perspective. What elements stand out? What isn’t clear from your board? Asking yourself these questions will help you see what elements may either need to be fleshed out with your designer or on your own time with your partner. For Tapestry, we are looking for inspiration in all of these categories for full-planning clients:

• Ceremony

• Website design

• Invitations

• Signage

• Couple’s style

• Wedding party

• Floral design

• Activities

• Reception

• Catering + dessert

• Favors + decor

Each of these categories is something that requires an element of design and thoughtfulness that we want to help you and your vendors envision. Finding visual inspiration for each of these buckets is not required for us to create a moodboard, but we love seeing it if you are called to explore all of them.

If you love organization, you will probably see all of these categories and immediately want to create sub-folders for each of them. Let me pause you before you go crazy labeling and getting specific about each element. Sub-folders are not helpful for designers. We can get the details through conversations with you and suggesting options. The value of the board for us is much more in the general vibes and colors that we can get from seeing all your pins together. TLDR; Sub-folders don’t allow for your designer to get a complete understanding of the event.

So, if sub-folders are still the way your brain works, we invite you to re-pin your fave pins from each sub-folder to a “Vibes” folder or to the main board so that we can still see the generalized vision of your event. In this Vibes board, you can include more emotionally evocative images or art that speaks to the feelings you want rather than just the visual representation. When highly organized clients do this, we are so thankful.

One last note is about how to find and curate images for your celebration. Searching Pinterest is a skill just like Googling. Sometimes you have to click on a lot of related searches to find something that speaks to what you want. We invite you to go on to the websites of your favorite photographers, planners you follow on Instagram, or any other type of vendor and pin images from their site. Not only will this help you find exactly the aesthetic you are going for, it will also help Pinterest learn more about what you are interested in. Additionally, if you are looking for elopement imagery, make sure you search the word “elopement” or “adventure.” Frequently, Pinterest will just serve you wedding imagery unless you deliberately tell it otherwise.

Let us know if this resource helped you! We’d love to see your boards and the ideas you come up with. Feel free to post them in the comments section.

— Kelleen, Tapestry Content Manager