Fridays are for following! The AnOther team selects three of the best moodboarders the image-led platform has to offer
From corkboards littered with drawing pins and postcards to Tumblr blogs and Google image search results, the moodboard has been an essential tool for the creative mind for as long as makers have been making. These days, Instagram provides a perfect platform on which to collate one's references – the infinite scroll, the arbitrary ordering, the seemingly haphazard clash and co-ordination of colours lending it neatly both to brainstorming and to procrastinating (which, one might argue, are almost one and the same, anyhow…) Here, AnOther selects three of the best accounts dedicated to moodboarding...
@referencebank
Founded by Chelsea College of Art’s BA Graphic Design Communication course, @referencebank is, in its own words, “a tool to widen your creative references and expand your practice”. It takes a three-pronged approach, generously dishing out recommendations in literature and film (“If you haven’t read this book, read this book,” it wisely advises of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation), pulling out rarely-seen works by some of the greatest creative minds the world has known (think: Stanley Kubrick and John Baldessari) and inviting other prolific Instagrammers (AnOther favourites Laura Jane Coulson and Raven Smith included) to take over the feed from time to time. For sufferers of creative block it is effectively both a cure and a preventative in one, and it’s endlessly entertaining.
@lekilt
Samantha McCoach's label Le Kilt unites homegrown Scottish references with a subcultural aesthetic – and the brand's Instagram account is a digital moodboard to that effect. "I try to get a balance that represents Le Kilt," she explains, "so I try and show where it comes from – Scotland – but also bits that reflect my personality: a stroppy girl." Mia Farrow, Anne Wiazemsky and plenty of Scottish punks sit alongside the occasional kilt shot or fastening found in her grandmother's sewing box (she worked in a Scottish kilt factory, and taught McCoach how to properly make a kilt): the resulting grid is a full immersion not only into the brand but a fantasy world, littered with safety pins and aspirational fringes.
@superhelder
Little is known about the mysterious figure behind @superhelder – a collated feed dedicated primarily to the pale, the peachy and the pastel – but what we can ascertain is that she’s a woman of exceptional aesthetic taste. Her feed brims with texture, from the tenderly peeled skin of a clementine to the satisfyingly smooth ease of a wide-toothed comb through freshly conditioned hair. Also featured: bathing routines, pottery and golden, goosepimpled skin, all of which combine in a feed that makes scrolling a sensory overload.
