You know how most of us say that motivational posters are lame, but we secretly love ’em? Well okay, we don’t love the lame ones, but we do love the ones that actually speak to us. The reason some of them move us at a core level is because they succeed at capturing our innermost thoughts and feelings. Trouble is, there are precious few of those.
So today I’m going to show you a quick and easy way to harness those feelings and use them to make your own creations – text and images that are meaningful specifically to you. (And if they work for others, they’ll get spread around, right? Win/win.)
Motivational posters are very simple. They have two parts: a quote and an image. The reason they’re so popular is because oftentimes these simple elements combine to provoke a complex feeling within the viewer. Once that feeling has been established, the brain does the rest of the work, and the poster just sits there and looks pretty.
Instead of looking at other people’s work and waiting for something to inspire us, we’re going to go at it from the opposite end – using our own emotions to create something that sings to us, and hopefully to others as well.
Here’s how to make your own in 5 minutes or less:
1) Make a new Pinterest board to house your work. Mine is called Create Your Reality.
2) Think of how you feel right now, in a bigger sense than “I’m hungry.” For instance, perhaps you feel creative today. Good, go with that word, or one similar.
3) Search the web for a quote pertaining to that feeling. In this example, I’d suggest a search string like this: quotes creativity or quotes imagination. Find one that strikes you.
4) If you read that quote and a specific kind of image comes to mind, then search anywhere (Google, Flickr, Pinterest) for that kind of image. Or if nothing comes immediately to mind, do your image search for the original word you used to find the quote.
5) When you have both the appropriate quote and a fitting image, pin the image to your board and use the quote as the description.
And you’re done!
The beauty of this is that it’s perfectly customized to you. If it works for someone else, that’s great, but these are yours. Every single one will speak to you. And they don’t have to be just “motivational,” either. You can use them to represent pain, anger, sadness, joy, confusion, laughter . . . anything you want. They’re your feelings, so use them in your own way. Create your reality.
Here’s the one I just did while writing this article: http://pinterest.com/pin/56717276526964524/
I’m doing one of these a day right now. It’s fast, easy, and fun, and when I look back after a month or so I’ll have a visual and written record of how I felt every day, in artistic form. Pretty cool.
I’ve also created a board for some of my writing – take a look! http://pinterest.com/natestpierre/my-writing/
This is how I’m starting to use Pinterest. How do you use it? Let me know in the comments…
P.S. If you like this idea, give it a Pin: Pin It
(Image source: shannonkringen)
