I personally feel that Pinterest is one of the best tools for anyone working on persona development.
Pinterest is a tool for creating digital "vision boards," and works on a sort of chain of association model. You can search terms directly, or you can click on a picture and it will show you a bunch of different related pictures and/or links. You can "pin" these to a board and create a little themed collage for yourself.
As a persona development tool, this is pretty priceless, especially if you're not 100% sure what you're going for yet.
Here's mine, for reference.
Let's do this step-by-step.
1. Create a board for your persona.
For example, here's the top of the Pinterest board I made for my persona, Allert Pierson. I have some word associations here from a visual standpoint to help guide my costuming, but also to help me better define how Allert presents himself to the world and what niche he fills in that society. You may not have all this information yet, and that's okay. Start simple, and refine as you go.
2. Use the search function to learn more about what your persona looks like.
Let's say you don't know a whole lot about your persona yet, but you know you really like The Tudors or Vikings and you'd like to portray someone from one of those periods. That's fantastic! We can work with that.
If I was going to search up some visual inspirations for Allert at the very basic level, I would type in "17th century man" or "1620s male clothing". You may type in "Roman man" or "Tudor woman".
Scroll down through the suggestions and make note of anything that really pops out at you. Pin everything you like to your persona's board. Don't be choosy, you can go back and remove some later!
Once you've been doing that for a while, go back and look at your board. Is there a cut of garment or color scheme or hairstyle that you really love and is coming up a lot? Click on the images and links and see if you can figure out what that's called, or specifically what time period it's from. If you can't narrow it down, that's okay - you can always ask for help later.
Quick note here - while it can be tempting to pin screenshots from movies and television shows (and that's a great place to start for general inspiration!) try to stick to portraits, sketches, and work from reenactors if you can. You don't have to duplicate what they're doing exactly! But, it will help give you a better picture of what folks were really wearing and doing at the time, rather than dramatized versions which are selected and designed for a very specific on-screen purpose.
3. Learn more about where your persona fits in the world.
Are you pinning a lot of pictures of noblemen, middle-class women, or soldiers? Are there some professions or particular locations that keep coming up? Why not try adding that to your search terms next and see what comes up? Google things you think are interesting. Let yourself be dragged down inspiration "rabbit holes" as you find them. Pay attention to what you really find engaging and exciting.
Pin pictures of landscapes, settings, buildings, books, and even color palettes and objects that might have existed in the world around them. This will help you to build texture and realism into your persona's life.
4. Use Pinterest's "more to explore" function to help you refine further.
You've found a pin that really interests you or seems to perfectly reflect the niche you want your persona to fill? Click on it. Scroll down. Pinterest will offer you lots of what it thinks are related ideas, and that can be an excellent way to discover more.
5. Revisit often and keep it joyful.
Persona is a conversation with yourself and with the past. As you play more and learn more about who you are and want to be, it's totally natural to go back and change and further define your persona. This is a vision board exclusively for your own use, not a set of rules!
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