Love Mood Boarding? Meet Landing
Take your collage projects online.
So long are the days of 2012 Tumblr, filled to the brim with collages of One Direction concert outfit ideas (at least that’s how I remember it), made on the app Polyvore, of course. The acquisition and subsequent closure of the mood board app in 2018 left creatives hunting for a new platform to fulfill their digital collaging needs. Many of these apps lacked freestyling elements, instead opting for simple grid layouts. Until Landing.
With an online mood boarding gap in the market, some turned to programs like PowerPoint and Canva to create collages with minimal formatting barriers. Two of those people were Miri Buckland and Ellie Buckingham, who used Google Slides to help their interior design clients visualize their potential decor. From this, Landing was born.
Landing is a social commerce platform for visual curation that allows users to create and share mood boards, connect with like-minded creatives and even “remix” other users’ creations. By prioritizing user-friendly features like remixing, the site celebrates everyone’s right to creative expression in all its different forms.
With more and more social media apps integrating shoppable content, Landing joins popular platforms like Instagram with its product catalog of trendy fashion, beauty and home items that users can add to their boards.
I sat down with the platform’s co-founder and COO Miri Buckland to talk all things vision boarding, community building and the future of Landing. Read our conversation (and see some amazing user boards) below.
For someone who might not know what it is, can you describe what a vision board or mood board is?
A mood board is a space for your visual curation. It's a place where you can visually express all your ideas, your hopes, your dreams – anything that represents you. A vision board is almost like a subset of mood boards. I think of vision boards as something that fits within the realm of manifesting your vision and your goals. Both are visual representations of your ideas.
What can people use Landing for?
We see people using vision boards and mood boards in so many different ways. We started out as a mood boarding platform for home and interior design, but we've seen people naturally using the platform we’ve built to make fashion boards, outfit plans, travel boards, recipe boards, favorite movie boards, book recommendation boards – all sorts of things.
Because it's so flexible, our community can take mood boards and make whatever they want. It's really about freeing that expression from the confines of a normal social platform where you might feel like you have to fit a mold or a certain aesthetic or a standard of perfection. To me, mood boards are a lot more flexible and allow people to be more authentic because of that.
Something unique about Landing is it gives people an opportunity to connect and riff off of each other’s feedback and ideas. Why was it important that Landing be a social network?
We are fundamentally a community-led platform. I can't emphasize that strongly enough. Everything we're building is in service of the community, and it's led by the community. That is our ethos. The reason Landing feels so fun and energetic is because of the community. Users are welcoming each other and they're leaving supportive comments. People are making digital creative friends. That's the most amazing part. As for remixing, we’re in this interesting cultural zeitgeist moment where remixing has become much more of a normalized form of creative expression through platforms like TikTok, where it's super normal to remix a trend and it’s not seen as copying. Similarly, on Landing, we see remixing as a positive way for our creators to credit other people and put their own spin on it.
How have you kept Landing such a positive space on the internet?
We knew from day one what type of community we wanted to create, and it was always going to be quite different from today's socials. We wanted it to be a supportive and uplifting space and not be about having to look a certain way. It's really about your ideas and your expression, and we've been super clear that we think everybody can be creative.
I have to give huge credit to our Head of Community, Liz, who has been the driving force behind a lot of this and has kept us true to our team values. She has implemented a culture of respect, trust, kindness, positive vibes, joy and creativity. We have modeled that behavior, and I think people pick up on it from the way that we approach users in comments. I think you start something by leading by example. We've been lucky that we had some really super users in the early days who became community ambassadors for us, and they wholeheartedly embody those values. They have modeled that behavior and become true advocates of the culture we want to build.
Let’s say someone, in theory, is not naturally inclined to vision boards or visual creativity. How does Landing help those people?
Growing up, I was never told I was the creative sibling. Over time, I’ve come to realize that creativity can mean a lot of different things. Just because you’re not necessarily great at drawing doesn’t mean you’re not a creative thinker, and it has been really important in the creation of Landing that we not leave anyone out.
I think remixing is a huge part of it. If you are overwhelmed by starting with a blank page, you can take templates already on the platform. Maybe you take a “My Favorite Books” template and swap out the books and add a couple of stickers or graphics. We created all these fun graphics and stickers that make any board look great. Often we find that once you’ve published one board, you get the hang of it pretty quickly. It’s a very intuitive process.
One tool on the platform that I really love is the background removal function that makes it easy to create stickers. Are there any features coming in the future that will continue to prioritize user-friendliness?
We are constantly asking the community what they want next. I’m hoping to have a crop tool, undo button and personalized feeds. We are also thinking about fun ways to build our community off-platform. We don’t have DMs yet, but we can leverage platforms like Discord and Instagram groups to allow people to connect.
What makes Landing different from apps like Pinterest or Instagram?
It’s the visual flexibility of the mood board in that it’s not just a grid of images. A mood board is a composition of multiple layers, images, products, stickers and backgrounds – it’s so much more visually rich.
I would also say the vision we have for the community is pretty different from what you would find on Pinterest. On Pinterest, it’s fairly anonymous. We really wanted Landing to be a space where you come back to because of the creators you connect with.
I think many people have great ideas for business ventures and startups, but how do you turn that idea into reality?
It takes a lot of iterations. We did not start making those mood boards on Google Slides with the idea that we were going to be building a consumer social app centered around visual curation. We started by saying, “People need a way to visualize things together,” and we tried to solve that problem in the home and interior design space. What we learned was that while we were making designs for people in Google Slides, they really wanted to do it themselves. So we started following that thread and kept pulling on it.
It wasn’t necessarily a big shift from making mood boards on Google Slides to turning this into a social mood boarding visual curation platform. There were many small shifts along the way, and it took closely listening to what our users were telling us. The most important thing is to have that humility to be led by your users, who you’re doing it all for.