Here’s a game. Open the Instagram of any brand that launched in the last two years. A candle company, a skincare line, a tiny label selling linen sets. Now close your eyes and picture the first page of Pinterest when you type “minimal aesthetic brand”. Open your eyes. Same thing, right?
The same beige. The same serif logo in lowercase. The same product shot on a travertine block next to a sprig of something dried. The same model, slightly out of focus, laughing at nothing. You’ve seen it a thousand times, and the brand thinks it’s being original.
Let me be clear before anyone comes for me: I love Pinterest. I use it every single day. It’s one of the best tools anyone interested in images has ever been given. My problem isn’t the app. My problem is what’s happening to the research process around it.
Trends aren’t new. This is something else.
There have always been design trends. Every decade has a look. Seventies brands had their warm browns and rounded type. The nineties had grunge flyers and then that clean, Calvin Klein-style minimalism. Industries have always copied their leaders. So I’m not pretending that sameness was invented by an app.
The difference is how the copying happens. Before, if you wanted references, you had to go find them. Old magazines. Libraries. Flea markets. Your grandmother’s photo albums. Film stills you paused on a terrible TV. Everyone’s research looked a little different because everyone went to different places, and that difference leaked into the work.
Now everyone goes to the same place, types the same words, and gets the same results ranked in the same order. The branding studio Base Design made this point in an essay on “the Pinterest effect”: when everyone has the same references at their fingertips, everyone ends up using them. The research step hasn’t disappeared. It has been outsourced to a ranking system.
The easier it gets, the worse it gets
There’s a word the writer Cory Doctorow made famous, “enshittification”, for the way online platforms slowly get worse for the people using them. I think something related is happening to creative work. Not the platform rotting exactly, but the process. The easier it is to find a reference, the less thinking goes into finding it, and the less of you ends up in the result.
Pinterest shows you what other people saved most. What other people saved most is, by definition, already popular. So the first scroll is never a discovery. It’s a consensus. And when a dozen agencies, a hundred founders and a thousand freelancers all start from that consensus, they all end up in the same room with the same travertine block.
An art director on Substack described the feeling perfectly in a piece called The Reference Trap: when the same fifty images keep coming back, you have to ask whether you’re researching or just recycling. That question should be pinned above every desk in every studio.
The moodboard has become the brief
A moodboard used to be a starting point. Something messy you made to find a feeling, then threw away once you had it.
Now the moodboard is often the finished product’s blueprint. Clients send a board and say “make it look like this”. Designers deliver something that looks exactly like that. Everyone is happy because nothing is surprising. Nobody has to defend a weird idea in a meeting. Nobody risks the client saying “that’s not what I pictured”, because what they pictured was the board.
And that’s how a perfume ad starts looking like a hotel ad, which looks like a furniture brand, which looks like a wellness app. Everything is tasteful. Nothing is memorable. You scroll past it and can’t name the brand three seconds later, which, if you’re paying for branding, is the one thing it was supposed to fix.
It’s not only small brands, sadly
It’s tempting to blame this on new founders who don’t know better, but I see it everywhere. Campaigns from big houses with photography that could belong to any of their competitors. Restaurant interiors in Mumbai, Paris and Brooklyn that feel like the same restaurant. Editorial shoots that recreate an image that went viral two years ago, shot for shot, without credit and without any new idea on top.
Architects are noticing it in homes too. One piece on Architizer described clients and architects both starting projects by opening Pinterest, and the result being spaces that look right but feel like replicas. That’s the whole problem in one sentence. Looks right. Feels like a replica.
So how do we research again?
I don’t think the answer is quitting Pinterest. I think it’s putting it back in its place, as one source among many instead of the only source.
Go past the first scroll. Scroll until it gets weird. The good stuff is never in the first forty pins.
Use words nobody else is typing. Not “minimal branding”. Try “1970s Bombay chemist packaging” or “Polish circus poster” or “Kerala lottery ticket”. Specific searches give specific results.
Go offline. Libraries, museum archives, second-hand bookshops, local markets, old shop signs, your own family’s things. References nobody else has are the only references that make you different.
Ask where an image came from. Half of what circulates on Pinterest has lost its source. Chase it back. The original is usually stranger and better than the repost.
Start with a feeling, not a picture. Write down what the brand should feel like before you look at a single image. Then find visuals for that feeling, not the other way round.
I still love you, Pinterest
Pinterest gave a lot of us, me included, an education in images we never would have had otherwise. It’s how a kid in a small town finds out that Japanese book covers exist, or that someone in 1960s Milan designed a lamp that looks like a flower. That’s a beautiful thing and I’ll defend it.
But a library isn’t a recipe. The point of looking at everything was always to come back with something nobody else saw. If we all come back with the same twelve images, we didn’t really look at all.
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