Friday, February 2, 2018

0: pining for pinning

This week I noticed how I was scrolling and scrolling (and scrolling) through Pinterest. More specifically, I was obsessed with seeing the entire picture of each pin. As you can see in my screenshot below, you can’t actually see the entire image for any of the pins. This caused me to scroll up and down the screen to view them. The scrolling caused more partial images to show. This then led me to begin the cycle again. I also noticed that a lot of the pins were the same pin, but that didn’t stop me from scrolling through to see if there were any different pins. After a while, and due to the repetitive nature of the pins, I was able to pull myself away from the screen.
The choice of layout for the pins definitely aids in my habitual scrolling, but the interesting part is that the pin sizes are largely determined by the people who upload the pins, not by Pinterest. There is a width limit of 238 px, which is determined by Pinterest, but the height is proportionally adjusted based on the image you upload.