Living room image above via Emily Summers + Coleman Coker via Fauxology

I’m excited to announce that D*S is branching out this week with two fun new projects. The first is the creation of a Design*Sponge page on Pinterest! Despite working online, I can be slow and skeptical about adopting new tech or social networking platforms. Just ask AC — it took me two years to get into Twitter, and now it’s a huge (and hugely enjoyable) part of my day-to-day life. Amy has been asking me to consider Pinterest for a while now (along with a lot of you reading), and I’ve been resistant for several reasons. First, I’ve always seen D*S as my own personal Pinterest — a place to talk about and share the things I love, both in pictures and words. Second, I’ve been pretty vocal online about the problems I had with images being taken from original content creators (bloggers, photographers, stylists, etc.) and re-pinned without any credit or support for the maker. That said, my opinions on Pinterest changed pretty dramatically after this year’s Alt Summit.

Ben, the founder of Pinterest, gave an honest, passionate and realistic talk about the beginnings of his business and what his goals for it were. I responded so strongly to his beliefs as a business owner and the respectful way he handled the crowd feedback (including the issues I mentioned above) that I came home and started talking with our team about creating a page and, if we did, what our reason/goal for it would be.

In the same way that Twitter has given me a new and different way to communicate with the community I love, we’ll use Pinterest to do something slightly different than what we do here on D*S. We’ll keep the same guiding principles behind the main blog but extend them by using the boards to give you real-time look into our main team’s design interests.

Here’s what we’ll be doing: Each month, we will pick two main trends we’re loving and gather images that best exemplify it. We talk about trends here on the blog, but we don’t get to flesh them out on a daily basis, so I’m excited to have a place where we can explore two distinct trends in a deeper way.

Image above: Neil Conley

To start, Kate and Amy have created boards celebrating our current obsessions: NAVY BLUE & COPPER. While we’ve discussed these in posts before, on our Pinterest page you’ll find dozens of extra images and ideas that you won’t see on the main site. Think of it as our own personal design obsessions organized and arranged in a way that lets you fall a little deeper down the trend rabbit hole. Click here to check out this month’s selections and see what else we’re interested in. I know I’m going to be pinning some new copper images today; it’s my favorite look to obsess over these days. xo, grace

*For those who’ve been asking, we will be adding a “pin this” button to D*S in our next round of website revisions.

Before joining the Design*Sponge team full-time, I spent my days at the New York Public Library. It remains one of my favorite places in the city, and my former colleagues at NYPL Labs have been doing some amazing things. Their new project, the Stereogranimator, launched just last week. If you’ve ever spent time looking through historic photographs, you might have noticed that many (often those dating pre-1900) come in seemingly identical pairs. These pairs, called stereographs, were meant to be viewed together using a proto-ViewMaster device that would give the dual images realistic depth. These stereographs allowed the viewer to immerse herself in a 3-D world — to virtually travel as far as Egypt, see the ruins of the Great San Francisco Earthquake or marvel at Niagara Falls. The New York Public Library has a massive collection of these stereographs, and with the Stereogranimator, you can transform these static images into an approximation of the 3-D stereograph viewing experience. Warning: It is extremely addictive. (And note: you can do a search for cats.) — Amy Azzarito

Image above: Made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Image above: Made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator