What to do instead of scrolling for inspo

Good morning Popular! I’m still on a teeny tiny island in Greece.
Enjoy this bite-size letter.

Start in a library. A library is any place with 2 or more books, one of which is an art book or magazine with images (my definition).

My last purposeful image gathering session: Brooklyn Public Library, main branch, 9am, early to beat the crowds. One rule for myself that day: open up something I’d never looked at before.

Read more about that session here:

I ended up in a history of skateboarding, Roman portraits, kente cloth, Aleut and Eskimo art — books with zero plan behind them. That was the plan, for this trip.

Yes/no test for a photo: does it make me want to think on it deeper, later, for safekeeping? I left with about 60 images, half iPhone, half my $95 digital camera, which gives everything a different aesthetic layer.

Got home, sorted, and the thing I’d honestly forgotten I loved — was end pages. The colors of them, the texture of the paper. The minimalist nature of these particular ones, plus, their usefulness covering the hardback canvas.

The Studio Book isn’t a system. It’s scrolling energy redirected into a book, an archive of your visuals, ideas and research that you keep coming back to.

Two of you wrote in after I first introduced the idea back in April, it’s nice to see my small pieces of advice in people’s daily lives.

“Your most recent post just inspired me to open a coffee table book I was gifted over a year ago and snap pictures of the images that really moved me. It felt fantastic.” – Abigail

“I went through my bookshelf and actually flipped through one of the photography books that were covered in dust, instead of scrolling on the phone for a change.” – Emare

And that’s my proposal to you: Open a book, not Pinterest.

A Studio Book is a self-directed, tactile version of your end-less ‘boards’ — it’s a record of your eye that you actually use later, that gets better the longer you keep it, instead of just accumulating on the dusty internet.

Case in point: the Studio Book I made for my textile studio, New Friends. Working with my creative partner Alexandra Segreti, we printed Tumblr images, library scans, photos of previous weavings we’d made, and hand-painted color studies of weavings that didn’t exist yet.

I took a big, hefty Moleskine, a glue stick, scissors, and my pile of images (printed at a local copy shop), and set to work. Cut, curated, arranged, collaged, sifted.

It’s still my working bible — an archive of what I was thinking about and working on, a decade later. I can trace how the ideas in that Studio Book became the future New Friends textile collection. It’s the work before the work, every bit as valuable as the final collection of weavings.

That’s what makes it valuable as a creative to have one. It’s not a scrapbook — it’s a place to consider, sort, and plan your next moves on any visual project.

In the Studio Book Workshop this August, I’m making a new one for myself — a book I’ll use to research and inspire Popular. I’m thinking about how I want to treat visuals, what roads I want to follow, what topics to go deeper on. I’ll be collecting both visuals and writing.

After the paywall I break down my 3 rules for your library session.