In 2007, Japanese interactive design company Tha Ltd, launched the world’s first image bookmarking site for creatives and designers. It was called FFFFOUND.com. It lasted 10 years. And it was a cult sensation in the world of design.
The original front page of the site, designed and developed by Yosuke Abe and Keita Kitamura, read: “FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user’s tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!”
It sounds old hat now. But in 2007, that was revolutionary. Nobody had ever made a site where users could curate images from the open web and then others could “like” them and save them to their own collections. Pinterest and Instagram wouldn’t exist for another three years. Flickr and Tumblr existed, but they were too mass. For every good Flickr feed, there were 100 lame ones.
Ffffound solved Flickr’s “tragedy of the commons” problem by making their site strictly invite-only. Every user had one invite to give to a designer friend who they thought had good taste. The idea was to keep the curation quality high. But making the site invite-only had another effect: a Ffffound membership became a badge of coolness. Some even started paying for invites on Reddit.
Sadly, the whole thing disappeared in 2017. This is what you’ll find on the front page of Ffffound now:
1. DESIGNSPIRATION
Established in 2010 by freelance designer Shelby White, Designspiration describes itself as “one of the world’s largest and most exclusive hubs for creativity, with over 17 million page views each month. High quality, visually engaging content is cycled through the site on an hourly basis, maintaining a high viewership from people all around the world every day. Content is constantly replenished from a number of creative industries: art, architecture print design, interior design, photography, typography, web design and more.” There’s even a Ffffound collection!
2. CREATIVE BOOM
It’s not an image bookmarking site, but CREATIVE BOOM is a very cool design magazine based in the UK that has been around since 2009 and brings inspiration, news and insights to over 7 million creative professionals every year.
3. DESIGN.GOOGLE
You could just use Google image search, but Google.Design is a cooperative effort led by a group of designers, writers, and developers at Google. Who knows the culture better than them?
4. INSPIRATION GRID
Launched in February 2011, Inspiration Grid is an online magazine celebrating creative talent from around the world. Your daily fix of design, art, illustration, typography, photography, architecture, fashion and more.
So there you have it. Four alternatives that may not fully replace Ffffound, but are still pretty cool. Where do you go for visual inspiration?
