Image Spark

Visit design blogs today and you’ll see quite a few inspiration board posts. They are usually a collection of pictures, nicely laid out to look like one cohesive unit with the intention of conveying a particular look and feel. For any designer, one of the first steps of a new project is research and that includes creating inspiration boards. In the old days, you can cut things out and glue or tape it to a board literally but what about now, when most images are online and we’re trying to save trees by not printing things out? Hello Image Spark!

Christine saw Image Spark in a design mag and mentioned it so I decided to check it out. I’ve been doing a lot of reading online lately for user experience and interaction design and sometimes I see examples of layouts or best practices that are worth remembering. Of course, it’d be just as easy to bookmark but sometimes all I really want is an image to trigger the thought. I like scanning so having all these little snippets at a glance would be much easier than opening a dozen pages.

So how does it work? You sign up for free, download a plugin to your browser, then when you right click on a image, there’s a option to save it to your imagespark account. You can then tag the image and sort as you please. There are two moodboards for free where you can drop your saved images and move around just like in real life.

This is a great tool for helping to manage your research when browsing pictures online. So what do you think? A step forward in replacing its offline counterpart?

~ Cassie

{ image from Image Spark }