10 reasons why I gave up Pinterest & built my design library on Eagle
A new way to organize all your design inspirations
Most creative people, such as product designers and digital artists, are familiar with Pinterest. People use it to build and collect inspiration boards for website designs, paintings, and architecture, among other things. Pinterest has been a part of my life for a long time and my first collection dates back to 2012. However, as my career progressed and I became a product designer, the tool has become less relevant to me since many aspects don’t fit my UI designer persona. Instead of being stuck with Pinterest, I have found a hidden gem of a tool called Eagle for organizing my design moodboard and resources. This post will revolve around ways and reasons why I ditched Pinterest and migrated all of my professional workflows to the Eagle app.
Why Pinterest isn’t relevant for product design?
At the moment, I am working on the design of a Fintech mobile and web application. Because I am starting from scratch, I must set up a design system, research hundreds of inspirations for designing a dashboard, and research font options, color palettes, iconography samples, website designs, notification tones, and mobile patterns. It would be impossible for me to build a complete inspiration list on Pinterest since it contains different resource types. To do each of these things that I mentioned above, you will need a tool that understands a particular file format and can seize inspiration from different sources.
Here is where Pinterest stops working since it’s a very simple tool for collecting inspiration but doesn’t work for advanced use cases where it is required to understand colors, fonts, audio, and vector. Hence, I decided to research and find a tool that is more fitting to my use case — Eagle.
Let’s start!
As far as tooling goes, both Eagle and Pinterest have their rightful place in the inspiration collection ecosystem. I will explain what I mean at the end of the post. But as a said building a design moodboard for a product requires the tool to tackle advanced use cases that Pinterest cannot handle. I will break down my process of building and migration into 10 reasons why and how I use Eagle. Hopefully, these reasons can motivate you to explore this upcoming tool for organizing your inspirations.
01 • Fast importing of inspirations
Many of my inspirations are stored in separate folders on Dribbble, Behance, and Pinterest, which don’t communicate with each other. Due to this, I am forced to manually download images from each of these sources into Miro. However, Miro’s performance degrades after a while since it cannot handle hundreds of images simultaneously. The Eagle application helps me solve two of the most pressing problems in the flow described above —
- Batch-pull of images from Pinterest, Behance, and Dribbble to store them in a single place. This saves me time and also helps me to keep all my inspirations in a single place.
- The tool doesn't break down when there is a large set of images to process. In fact, during my extensive usage, it feels like it was built for that.
👉 For batch importing of images, I am using Eagle’s Chrome browser extension.
💡 Did you know that some sites like Behance blocks the right click of the mouse that stops people from downloading images? Fortunately, Eagle-app blows past this JavaScript restraint.
02 • Resources from Community
When I moved from Sketch about five years ago, Community support within Figma was a highlight feature that even to this day helps me to learn from other designers, download free resources built by fellow designers, and interact with people I could never meet in person. I can say that the reason why people use Pinterest is because of this very reason where they can simply pin other people’s images and build their inspiration boards. With Eagle, I can divert my attention to its Community for collecting resources and not just inspiration. For example, I can download fonts, icons, and illustrations for my product design UI work.
03 • Image tagging and filtering
Image sorting after collecting mega-tons of inspirations in my moodboard is a nightmare. Eagle allows me to tag all of my resources with multiple keywords which allows me to get to the most relevant image faster than I could ever before. To give an example, I have to collect snapshots from Revolut. The snapshots can be categorized as —
- Marketing/Promotion campaigns
- Website folds
- App patterns
- App Store and Play Store images
All of these images need to be tagged with Revolut, combined with another keyword to make the search short. Furthermore, I can filter my results based on dimensions, aspect ratio, file type, URL, and personal notes. Personal notes added to images are especially helpful when brainstorming ideas.
04 • Hunting by color palette
When I was building my Fintech moodboard in Eagle, hunting images that have the same or similar blue color was extraordinarily useful. In the fintech wallet app world, blue is an overused color, and tons of apps that I collected inspiration from used the color blue. It would have taken me ages to find all the images with similar hued blue colors. Eagle can distinguish images using colors because it breaks down each image into a six-colored palette that can be used for filters.
Eagle’s color palette feature remarkably captures the HEX, RGB, HSL and CMYK values for each color and allows you to copy them to the clipboard for further use in another design tool.
05 • Support for 90 file format types
I have saved an array of resources and assets to my Eagle library and I am astounded to see the range of file types that the tool supports. It can process 90 file types which include all types of images, 3D object-based assets, tool-based files like Fig/PSD/Ai, video, audio, font, image-RAW, and document-based formats like XLS, and DOC. To give you an example even though Figma is now owned by Adobe, I cannot simply open and preview Adobe vector assets like AI, EPS, or PDF assets in Figma. A unified solution that supports a large range of file types is unbeatable for every creative.
06 • Live link saving
While designing landing pages, saving web links becomes important. Snapshots of a particular section are an ordinary solution that doesn’t quite cut it. Usually, I require both a live link save and a snapshot of the website. Chrome plugin-based tool — FireShot is a terrific option for capturing the entire website and combined with Eagle you can save the live URL of the website as well. The best part about Eagle’s URL saving is that it opens the website within the tool, which is excellent for reducing distractions and keeping me within my workflow.
07 • Nested folder management
Interlinking one folder to another to create a parent-child relationship while collecting images from similar sources is great for information hierarchy and management. Pinterest, unfortunately, doesn’t support the nesting of boards, but Eagle does. For my use case, I had to segregate all of the Playstore and Appstore images separately while also having individual folders for each app where I captured a long list of app previews. I found an engaging support link that explains all the folder operations that the user can perform using the Eagle app.
08 • Finding Duplicates
Every designer would have faced this issue where they end up adding the same image twice on multiple boards, sometimes knowingly and often by mistake. Midway through the exercise, I decided to scan my entire library to find 67 images that are identical copies of each other in different folders. I spent fifteen minutes posting that discovery manually deleting the non-relevant duplicates and keeping some with a note to not delete them in the future.
09 • Works from the clipboard or drag & drop
As you might have already gathered from my experience, setting up a well-architected moodboard is a challenging task. It requires plenty of work and filling in the image names, descriptions, and other values, which I find quite mundane. I usually spend 2–3 hours just taking screenshots from multiple sources and then organizing those screenshots into logical folder structures. Since the number of screenshots can be anywhere from 200+, the drag-and-drop feature comes in handy. Unlike Pinterest, I can drag-&-drop 200+ unorganized images into Eagle and choose to keep them as is or organize them later when I need to. The app doesn’t force me to name each of my files. I usually end up categorizing and bulk-renaming and tagging them in less than 10 minutes. I can also directly copy and paste images from my clipboard which is great for when dealing with a tool like Figma or Confluence.
10 • Great for a design system mood board
In the end, Eagle as I mentioned above is great for building a product design moodboard. Here’s what my moodboard folder structure looked like during the collection phase —
I ended up collecting a lot more just mobile and web inspiration. The total bundle consisted of yearly fintech reports, color palettes, app flows, design patterns, Playstore/AppStore screenshots, notification tones, logos, icons, illustrations, and real website URL collections.
There’s one more thing…
Even with all the great things I can accomplish with Eagle, there is one nitpick I think can be improved. Eagle is primarily a locally installed client-based tool. This means I cannot browse my images on a mobile device and cannot access my inspirations from an online-only device like an iPad. I can still back up my entire library to Google Drive or Dropbox, but I can’t view them when not have access to my laptop. Although this is not a deal breaker, it is not ideal. When starting a new project, I am often obsessed with collecting a lot of inspiration on and off, which means I am prone to collecting images while doing activities like commuting.
I hope Eagle in its future version can support a mobile-based experience. It can be particularly tricky to solve when tackling large file types, but one way to show only PNG, JPEG, WEBP, GIF, MP3, and MP4 resources on the online version, and other complex file types could be blocked from being previewed. This solution might be able to cover a vast set of image-based collections.
As an immediate solution to this problem, I am continuing to use a mobile-enabled tool like Pinterest or Behance to capture ideas and solutions on the move. Later, I pull my entire cloud repository to Eagle which enables me to unify all of the ideas.
End notes
At the end of the day, Eagle is a tool like any other. It cannot filter out shitty ideas or help us to create a stellar app automatically. What it does is, enhances the workflow to increase our productivity and improve execution speed. I have saved a ton of time and effort jumping between different workflows and tools just for organizing, and consume my ideas and information systematically. I started my exploration with that in mind and achieved exactly that by using the Eagle app. If you are looking for a mind-blowing tool that helps you to organize a complex set of assets and perform a ton of practical operations on your resources then look no further.
That’s the end of this short yet hopefully insightful read. Thanks for making it to the end. I hope you gained something from it.
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