A New Space For Fun On The Internet

It was the eve of my 22nd birthday and it was my dream (8 years too late) to be a dancing queen. Consequently, my party was to be disco themed. I bought metallic silver balloons and queued up a playlist filled with Cher. Then it was time for my favorite task of party planning— designing the invitation. I entered disco, Studio 54, glitter extravaganza, and sparkles into the search tab on Pinterest and started a new board to collect my disco-flavored pins.

My night started looking bleak when I realized I would need to copy over each individual pin to a different app in order to layer them into a pretty picture. It was looking like a complicated and tiresome process. And as someone who spent their past summer working alongside Manhattan art advisors and loved every minute of it, even I found this number of steps absurd in the name of digital artistic design.

This has been a consistent issue with Pinterest, who, while experiencing recent appreciation for being an epicenter of aesthetic curation, has grown some thorns alongside its bed of rosy pins. Besides including ads alongside every other pin on their feed, by far the biggest annoyance is that there is simply no way to create within Pinterest. You may say hold on—I use Pinterest for all my creative projects. And while that may be true, it is a starting place and never the birth canal of the final edition. In addition, the lack of social interaction with others directly on the app can make it an isolating digital experience. These limitations are pushing its users to new grounds, including me.

One site capitalizing on both Pinterest's popularity and faults that has exploded with its unfaithful is Landing. Landing’s creators even acknowledge the comparisons to Pinterest on their website, “Many Landing creators are active Pinterest users, and many of the creators on Landing actually discovered Landing through Pinterest!”

It was when I was scrolling through Instagram for more inspiration for my invitation that I came across an ad for Landing, pitching itself as my new “creative escape”. I signed up for the app and a bright, oxidized yellow landing page greeted me as I searched disco on their main page. I was able to collect over a dozen images that I then assembled into my disco invitation.

By this point, I was becoming a Landing convert. As a college student studying art history and training in curation I am always intrigued when people do what I do for work, for fun. We curate even when we don't mean to: when we create vision boards for our hot girl summer or mob girl winter, printing out and cutting up images of fur coats and stringy bikinis. When crafting a moodboard, or any type of collage, we are also creating and curating ourselves. The decision between what app we want to plan our next birthday party invite reveals not only who we are, but also who we are hoping to become.

Landing is a venue for the collages assembled from your favorite Pinterest pins. It has been in development since 2019 with its app launching in 2023. The modus operandi is to scroll through your feed and take in visuals that are identifiable as collages. You sprinkle ‘Glitter’ on the canvases you admire and comment on those you love. You can enter ‘Spaces’ to share collages created around a theme such as a daily prompt or music and chat with others who share the same aesthetic sensibilities.

The best characteristic of Landing is the ability to borrow from what you admire. For each collage that flows down your phone screen, you can click on the image and then literally break down the entire collage into individual visual details. A disco scene breaks down into: Bright lights. Drinks. Multicolored dance floors. Individual sequins. Going out selfies. A collage celebrating girlhood dissolves into: Sophia Coppola screenplays. Four leaf clovers. Evermore lyrics. Pressed flower prints. You can then collect the sequins, selfies, and lyrics into your Favorites library and then use those to make your own creations.

I finished my birthday invitation with some text details and sent it out to all my friends. As I was about to click out of the app, I was invited to publish my creation onto the general feed of Landing. After a couple of days I checked back into the app and noticed I had received one comment on my creation. It was from one of the app developers, an automated voice inviting me to further share my creation in one of the app’s social ‘Spaces’.

I joined these Spaces and realized they rung hollow with little authentic reactions or interaction to be found. On Landing, their intention is to build “a community where visual inspiration, curation and connection come together,” but once you have harvested the items you find most evocative, the correspondence with other creators fizzles out. Without the opportunity to truly collaborate, either across Spaces or within each other's creations, the voices of Landing’s creators reign the loudest and its users are swept down the feed.

In reviewing both apps, Pinterest still beats Landing in terms of recommendations of pins for your interests. And more suspiciously, Pinterest appears to be responding to Landing's encroachment on their collage space with a new feature that basically does what Landing does but more clunkily. Landing’s head of community has commented on this within the Instagram comment’s of a video celebrating Landing, effusing that, “some say they [Pinterest] were quite inspired by Landing… as an 11 person female founded startup, we are honored,” with a smiling crying emoji. In a slow but steady race to be the internet's preferred locale for emblematic imagery, Pinterest might still hold the reins from competitors like Landing as the center of digital aesthetic curation.

But don’t let me be the final voice on all things digital moodboards— the most amazing thing about this medium is how personal it can be. We as a people deserve to be able to scrapbook on our cell phones and Landing might be the best new byte of mod podge we’ve got.

So which app did I ultimately use to craft my amazing disco night invitation? Both. As well as another free photoshop app for further personalization. It turns out, in order to craft a unique piece of art, sometimes it calls for a unique assembly of tools. And while I received little fanfare from the community of Landing, sharing my invite with my actual birthday attendees helped me create the community Pinterest lacks and Landing is still developing. In the end, I learned that while Pinterest allows you to prepare to be an amateur curator and Landing allows you to create like one; it is still up to you to truly share your creation and curate your own community.