Five Social Image Bookmarking Sites For Design Inspiration15.03.09
Every designer has one on their computer somewhere – a folder full of images collected from all over the net which serves as the basis for their work & inspiration, and which are more often then not comprised almost entirely of other artists/designers work.
As is the nature of the internet, the best of these works usually rise to the top and are shared amongst the design community, ultimately being given the exposure they deserve. Social image bookmarking looks to expedite this process, by creating communities centered around sharing images, just like del.icio.us does for regular bookmarks, Reddit does for news, and Twitter does for…well…pretty much everything.
Whether you are a designer looking for some inspiration or just someone who appreciates great images, here are five social image bookmarking sites you might want to check out:
WeHeartIt is one of the most popular image bookmarking sites around, most likely thanks to its 10k strong user base and wide range of images. Another nice feature is that NSFW images are flagged so they don’t show up expectantly on the home page, giving you an unwelcome eye full. You can also sort images by tags so it is easier to find similar images if you come across something awesome.
The most popular of all the image bookmarking sites, ffffound reigns supreme thanks to its invite-only nature and designer slant. This means you get a consistent flow of amazing images from a small group of professionals without all the trivial filler (and if anyone from ffffound is reading this, I’ll gladly sell a kidney for an invite 
). Other awesome features are the visual “similar to” feature, which gives you the amazingly uncanny ability to find images with a consistent visual style, and the ability to see bookmarking activity of those who dug a particular image.
Quickly gaining popularity, vi.sualize.us is a slick site which combines some of the best features from WeHeartIt (adding tags to saved images) and ffffound (the ability to see who liked an image) with new features like the ability to add a vi.sualize.us badge to your website, a Wordpress plug in, and the ability to use the service on your iphone/itouch using a 3rd party application called iView – very nifty.
One of the newest sites on the block, Dropular is fairly bare-bones at the moment, but that is part of its appeal. The site is extremely minimalist, with a simple black and white color scheme and the images recently added to site site. My favorite part however is the fact that you can navigate the site solely with your keyboards arrow keys, just tap up or down to move between the images on the page, and left and right to switch between pages. This goes a long way towards an engaging user experience since some of these sites have have terribly long pages, which make for ridiculous amounts of scrolling. Also, just like ffffound, this site is invite-only.
Lastly, we have Typeish, which is worth mentioning based solely on the great layout of the site, which is modeled after a pad of yellow notepaper. This site seems to be more design focused, but from what I have seen there is quite a diverse array of images which are sorted under various categories like art, fashion, packaging, etc.
