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How to make a vision board on Pinterest that you will actually look at
· Lucas Viegas · 7 min read
Make one public Pinterest board. Pin 20 to 40 specific images: goals you can picture, places, the person you are becoming, a few words, one or two constraints. Then put it where you will see it every day. That last part decides whether it works.
Below: what to pin, how many, one board or sections, when it has to be public, how to review it, and where to put it.
What should you pin on a vision board?
Vision boards fail in two ways: too vague to mean anything, or too big to read. The fix for both is to pin only things you could point at and explain in one sentence. Five kinds cover nearly everything.
| Kind of pin | Pin this | Skip this | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goals | The actual outcome: the flat from the listing, the race bib, the finished cover. | The word ‘success’ over a sunset. | You can tell at a glance whether you are closer to it. A mood cannot be checked. |
| Places | The street, the coastline, the city, the room you intend to work in. | ‘Wanderlust’ collages of places you have no plan to visit. | Places read instantly, even at thumbnail or wallpaper size, and need no caption. |
| The version of you | Someone doing the work the way you want to: the posture, the pace, the kitchen at 7 am. | Famous faces for their own sake. | A daily behaviour you can copy tomorrow, not a trophy you cannot act on. |
| A few words | Three or four words on a plain background, in a sentence you would actually say. | Long quotes in script fonts. | Short words stay legible when the pin is small. Long ones turn into texture. |
| Constraints | One or two limits you have already set: a budget line, a bedtime, ‘not this year’. | A second board of everything you are saying no to. | The board then also reminds you what you decided to leave out. |
Vision board examples that pass the test: the exact bike you are saving for, price in the pin title; the floor plan of a two-bedroom flat; a friend’s marathon finish photo; a plain white pin that says “bed by 11”; the Lisbon street you want to live on. Each can be checked off, visited or copied.
How many pins should a vision board have?
Between 20 and 40. Below 15, the board looks unfinished, so you stop adding to it and then stop opening it. Above 60, it turns into a feed: you scroll it instead of reading it, and no single pin gets a second look.
Should you use one board or sections?
One board, no sections. Sections suit a large reference board. A vision board is meant to be read in one glance, and sections split it into tabs you open one at a time.
There is a practical reason too: outside Pinterest, a section has no address of its own. Embeds and wallpaper tools read the whole parent board, so if part of your board deserves to stand alone, give it its own board.
How do you make the board, step by step?
About thirty minutes, once. The order matters: the list comes before Pinterest, and the cut comes before the wallpaper.
Seven steps, from list to desktop
- 1Write the goals down first. Before opening Pinterest, write three to five goals on paper, each with a date. A board built from search results is a mood board. One built from a list is a plan.
- 2Create one new board and leave it public. Name it plainly, ‘2027’ or ‘The plan’, and leave the secret toggle off. If you want it private, use a second, public board later for anything that leaves Pinterest.
- 3Find one picture per goal. Search for the specific outcome, not the category: the model of bike, the neighbourhood, the kind of desk. Save the image that looks like the result, not the prettiest one.
- 4Add the rest of the board. Add a few places, one or two people doing the work the way you want to, three or four words on a plain background, and one or two constraints. Stop between 20 and 40 pins.
- 5Cut anything you cannot explain. Open the board and go pin by pin. If you cannot say in one sentence why a pin is there, delete it. The pins that survive are the board.
- 6Put it where you will see it every day. A board that only lives inside the Pinterest app gets opened once a month at most. Set it as your phone lock screen, print it, or make it your Mac wallpaper.
- 7Review it monthly. Ten minutes, once a month: remove pins for goals that are done or dead, replace anything that has stopped meaning something, add at most two or three.
Does the board need to be public?
Only if you want to use it outside Pinterest. Inside the app, a private board works exactly like a public one. On a website, in an embed or as a Mac wallpaper, it has to be public, because Pinterest only serves public boards to other apps.
The trade-off: a public board shows on your profile and can turn up in Pinterest search. If that bothers you, keep the original private and make a second, public board with only the pins you want on your desktop. The switch is in the board settings; here is the exact path on the web, iPhone and Android.
How often should you review a vision board?
Monthly, and briefly. Put ten minutes in the calendar for the first of the month: delete pins for goals that are done or quietly dropped, replace any pin that has stopped meaning anything, add at most two or three. A board that only ever grows turns back into a collection.
Once a year, rebuild it from a fresh list. Keeping a few old pins is fine. Keeping most of them means the list did not change, which is worth noticing.
What decides whether a vision board actually works?
Whether you see it daily. Not how pretty it is, not how many pins it has, not the words on it. A board you open once a quarter is a bookmark folder with better pictures.
The Pinterest app is a poor place for that, because opening the board means opening the feed, and the feed is where the next twenty minutes go. Put the board somewhere you already look: a print by the desk, or the phone lock screen if you keep it to one collage.
On a Mac, I use VisionWall, which I also make, so weigh the recommendation accordingly: a menu-bar app that turns any public Pinterest board into a live, rotating desktop wallpaper. It refreshes every 30 minutes by default (2 minutes to 2 hours), and new pins appear on their own, so a pin saved on the phone in the morning is on the desktop by lunch. One-time $11.99, no subscription, no account, macOS 13.3 (Ventura) or later, public boards only. More on the vision board wallpaper page.
Pick the place today, before you add another pin.
What else do people ask about Pinterest vision boards?
Can I turn an existing Pinterest board into a vision board?
Yes, but not as it is. A board you have saved to for years is a collection, and most of it is not a goal. Create a new board, re-save the 20 to 40 pins that are actual goals, places, people and words, and leave the big board alone as inspiration.
Do the pins need captions or descriptions?
No. The image should carry the meaning on its own, because a wallpaper, a print and a lock screen all drop the caption. If you need text to remember why a pin is there, the picture is wrong or the goal is not clear yet.
What do I do with pins for goals I have already reached?
Remove them at the monthly review. A finished goal left on the board makes the whole board read as finished, and you stop looking at it. If you want to keep them, move them to a separate ‘done’ board, for once a year rather than every day.
Is a Pinterest vision board better than a physical one?
Neither; they fail differently. A physical board is seen because it hangs where you pass it, and is a pain to edit. A Pinterest board is easy to edit and to put on a lock screen or desktop, but invisible unless you deliberately put it somewhere you look. Choose the one you will see.
Vision board wallpaper for Mac
How a public board becomes a live desktop wallpaper.
Read the pageMake the board public
The exact path on the web, iPhone and Android.
Read the guideBoard’s done. Now see it.
One-time $11.99, macOS 13.3 (Ventura) or later, no subscription, no account.
Get VisionWall · $11.99