The new collection, called Eyecandy, is a side project of Wieden+Kennedy Portland creative Jacobi Mehringer. It launched March 28 (via this LinkedIn post) with 400 references and has quickly ballooned to more than 2,200 as creatives have flocked to it—and have even been sending Mehringer their own libraries to include.
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The site got more than 4,000 visits on launch day, more than 12,000 the next day, and is now growing faster than Mehringer ever imagined.
“I’ve worked with Lawrence [Sher], who created ShotDeck [a free library of film stills], and I always wished there was something like that for visual techniques,” Mehringer told Ad Age. “A lot of art directors are told, ‘If you find a great reference, don’t share it. That’s your secret weapon.’ But the coolest thing has been all these creatives reaching out and saying, ‘Hey, this is awesome.’”
The Eyecandy homepage has links at the top to dozens of techniques. Clicking on each one leads to a page full of GIFs showing the technique in action. This is useful for those who don’t have a strong filmmaking vocabulary and prefer to search visually, Mehringer said.
