How to build a mood board offline

Get off Pinterest and Are.na

Apartments with Eames chairs, Noguchi lamps, and a stack of Apartamento magazines. Dimly lit restaurants with curved red leather booths. The pastel grid of cans in the ‘Better-For-You’ beverage aisle. A beauty brand’s latest post: their lip balm, artfully arranged beside meticulously placed cubes of frozen fruit.

Everything looks the same because everyone is drawing from the same references. Chronically online, we’re trawling through the same Pinterest and Are.na boards, inhaling TikTok trends and sending the same Insta posts back and forth. A collective mood board on repeat.

From For Scale Substack

One of my favorite Eye on Design articles from a few years ago dissected this phenomenon in brand content, analyzing dozens of eerily similar posts from a variety of different brands, in different categories. The takeaway? Internal brand teams and agencies are caught in the same reference echo chamber. As the article puts it:

“Visual homogeneity is a common occurrence in the art direction world, where ubiquitous styles operate less like trends and more like memes.”

The clouds-as-background trend is just one example of how art direction aesthetics routinely become homogenized and overused. Read the full article here

A good brand builder knows the best inspiration lives outside of their category. If you’re creating a skincare brand, look to nature, food and fashion. If you’re designing homeware, look at architecture and subcultures. If you’re developing a fashion brand observe art movements or industrial design.

But that’s no longer enough.

Instead of recycling the same well-worn digital references, I’m noticing some tiny signals towards deeper, less accessible sources.

While The Internet Archive remains a goldmine of old magazines and books, I think the next wave of curation is moving beyond free and open platforms. We’re entering an era of paywalled Substacks, niche print businesses, and carefully curated archives that serve as exclusive portals to vintage, hard-to-find offline visual references. The kind not everyone has access to.

And here’s the real shift: tastemakers and curators are stepping in to do the trawling for us. Instead of aimlessly scrolling, we can rely on experts who navigate offline archives, uncovering forgotten aesthetics and delivering them in exclusive, tightly controlled spaces.

The future of creative research may look less like an open Pinterest board and more like a paid membership to a highly curated, invite-only visual library.

Here are a few tiny signals I’ve noticed:

• High valley books: Not just a bookstore, but an appointment-only archive of vintage books and magazines in the owner, Bill’s apartment in Greenpoint.

• M_R.A.A.D: Proof that even interior design inspiration is moving behind paywalls, with references handpicked by Max Radford Gallery.

• For Scale: Part moodboard, part manifesto—offering deep, context-driven explorations of architecture and culture, packed with historical visual references you won’t find on Pinterest.

My weekend adventure to High Valley Books

This isn’t just about exclusivity; it’s about moving beyond the expected aesthetics that already fill our feed. As more brands, designers, and creatives look to break free from visual sameness, the most interesting references will be the ones you have to pay—or dig—for.