As much as I'm devoted to Pinterest (and boy am I. I'm currently at over 10,600 pins?!?!), and as much as I love the ability to access inspirational images/directions/recipes anytime, anywhere, I still love ripping inspirational images out of magazines. I find some sort of weird comfort in their physical presence. There's nothing like touching those pages and just taking the images in #oldschool. I've been collecting magazine tears for years (since 1987 to be exact) when I started stashing them away. I ended up with huge stacks of papers in complete disarray. I could never find what I needed and the pages were getting ripped and damaged. So about 15 years ago I decided to go through them, purge, group and organize and create my "Inspiration Notebooks". This post is just a quick walk-through of how I update them and stay on top of the endless stream of paper - it can get overwhelming.
1. I stash all tear sheets into a clear zip top folder, until it's full.
2. When it's full, I pull the stack out and the sorting begins according to the categories of the notebooks I have.
3. I have pre-made file folders with the categories. I file the stacks of images accordingly. If time is tight, I'll stop here until later.
4. Now comes the fun (and time consuming) part, putting the full page images in sheet protectors.
Making sure to trim any down and make sure they "flow" nicely.
5. The remaining will be images that need to be cut out and pasted in separately. In the tear sheet below, I really just wanted the image of the room and nothing else.
6. Flip through the book and find a page where there's enough empty space for it to fit. I just use plain white copy paper to tape it to.
7. Use a little tape on the back to put it on the page.
8. That's it! Now you have more goodies to look at when in need of inspiration (or are away from Pinterest - ha)!
Do you still save magazine tears for inspiration? How do you preserve them for reference?
And that's just a few pages from one notebook! These are sort of a chronicle of what I've found interesting and archive-worthy over all these years. I love getting them out and taking a trip down memory lane. It's really a good tool to track what catches your eye or what is inspirational, you begin to see trends. Through these I've learned about what makes me tick design-wise. There are a lot of feelings in those books. I also learned during my massive purge, what things didn't stand the test of time. But I also ran across some images that have not only stood the test of time, but still amaze me (an ad for Yves Saint Laurent shoes with bows on them that I had pulled when I was a junior in High School comes to mind). I sometimes wonder what I will do with these books when all is said and done, who will want them. I'm not sure, but for now I will keep adding and sometimes subtracting. More and more my images are coming from the Internet and I'm filing them away there too. So my notebooks aren't growing as quickly as they used to. I wish I had been better about documenting what year and magazine some images were pulled from, but honestly I had no idea all those years ago that I would be still at it, I'm getting better about that these days. Hope you enjoyed!
