It's hard not to like Pinterest. We have our own Pinterest board, and it's all too easy to spend hours wandering through Pinterest in search of excellent imagery. It's without doubt a great platform for showcasing artwork, but at the same time it has a bit of an image problem. If you're serious about your work, do you really want your design portfolio to be lost amongst all those pictures of shoes and cakes?
Stampsy might be the alternative that you're looking for. Created by Moscow-based creative media pioneer Roman Mazurenko in response to the limitations of popular microblogging platforms, at first site Stampsy bears something of a resemblance to Pinterest, with Stamps – its answer to Pinterest's boards – arranged in a very Pinterest-like way.
Dig deeper though and you'll find that Stamps themselves are a lot more versatile than boards, enabling users to lay out text, images, video and even audio to create photos stories, mood boards, visual essays and more.
The look is more upmarket Tumblr, with eye-catching hero images that put us in mind of sites like Medium, and it features a built-in social layer that not only makes it easy to share stuff, but also to remix and reuse; indeed, Stampsy boasts that it positively encourages members to use other people's images to create new content.
Stampsy aims to remove the cost and coding skills required to build elegant microsites, and from its early days with a small network of photographers, it's now grown to over 30,000 members, with studios such as Hugo + Marie and Six & Five Studio already making great use of Stampsy to showcase their work.
Naturally it's still small fry compared to the likes of Pinterest and Tumblr, but we like the cut of its jib; if you're looking for a place where you can display your work with a chance of it being seen and appreciated by a more design-focused audiences, you should definitely take a look at what Stampsy has to offer.
Words: Jim McCauley
Jim McCauley is a writer, editor and occasional podcaster, and is available for children's parties.
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