Before the days of Pinterest, people obsessed with keeping inspirational images from magazines (me!) had to do something that to many may sound archaic. We had to rip all those glossy pages right out of the latest issues and figure out a place to keep them. Our desk spaces weren't nice minimalist areas housing with only a bud vase, a family photo and a shiny Mac monitor. We had stacks of paper piled to the ceiling, pens without caps and caps without pens, and at least in my case, lots and lots of chaos.
Fast forward 15 years.....
I have
hundreds thousands of pages lying around my office that I've torn out from design magazines for as long as I can remember. I love flipping through them. It's like reading a great design book written only for me with images i love. Don't judge, but it's one of my favourite things to do. I can't part with them. Why would I? I use them for creative inspiration all the time. But, what to do with them?
Scanning them seems like the most sensible option, but I refuse to spend the time it would take to scan each tattered piece of glossy paper. It would take years! Ugh. And photographing them means there's always some piece of the page that's left out.
I used a binder system for a while, having one binder per topic (living rooms, bedrooms, recipes, etc.) but binders take up so much space and you have to insert each sheet into a plastic cover which can take way too long and cost too much money. As I said, I'm talking about thousands and thousands of sheets here.
My new system may not be the neatest but it's quick and inexpensive. I went to Staples and picked up a few boxes of 50 Report Covers. Each cover holds 20 sheets and you don't need to punch holes or anything. You just pile a bunch of sheets together and insert them into the folder. It takes about 10 seconds. I'm excited to say that this system may mean that I can finally, after years and years, get all the papers tidied up and put away, and I can just sit back and enjoy flipping through some of my favourite images.
What do you guys do about this problem? Do you have any great space saving solutions that you could offer up as a suggestion?