Non-work uses for Trello: Collections - Nail Varnish Board
I was inspired by @Jodi LeBlanc's article entitled A Collection of Treasured Items and thought that I would start a collection board of my own. I don’t collect many physical things, but I appear to be a bit of a nail varnish addict. I hardly ever wear it, but I seem to collect them!
The problem that I have is that I always buy the same ones because those are the colours that I like, which means I end up with like 5 of the same one as I can’t remember which ones I already have!
In the whole ongoing decluttering effort in the house, I wasn’t looking forward to going through my nail varnishes, there were so many! Some of them I don’t even remember getting, and some I knew I’d never worn.
So the first plan was to go through and take out the ones that either I didn’t like or wasn’t 100% sure about, they ended up in a pile for Mother to look through so that she could grab whichever ones she wanted before we gave the rest (that were suitable) to my 5-year-old Goddaughter to play with. Please believe that I’m not gender stereotyping a 5-year-old girl here, she shared them with her 8-year-old brother too.
So I was left with a drawer full, which was a massive cull from the 4 shelves I had before!
The next stage was organising, I needed to put similar colours together so that I knew what I had and could find the colour that I wanted easily, and the drawer looked very pretty!
The wonders of Tupperware for organising inside drawers!
See what I mean - look at the dust!
But I still had the problem that I didn’t know what I had when I was out and about shopping.
I had pictures, but that didn’t tell me all the information that I needed, like the shade or shade number and all of the pictures were taken in different lights so I couldn’t work out the shade from the picture, not to mention the fact that I had pictures of bottles I didn’t have anymore!
In order to get that, I would have had to have taken multiple photos of the same bottle and that’s just a faff! Taking the pictures is fine and quick and easy, but finding them and finding the exact one that I have in my hand in the shop and comparing it to photos on my phone was a nightmare! And I could just have easily just bought it and if I already had it ‘oh well,’ in fact that would have been far quicker!
So I needed a way to digitally organise them so that I could see ALL the information when I was out and about, so that I didn’t buy a shade I already had.
Of course, I turned to Trello! What else?!
Is there anything that Trello can’t do?
I haven’t found anything so far!
I chose a nail inspired background from Joanna Kosinska who takes wonderfully minimalist photos for her Unsplash, including this one:
If you type in ‘nail varnish’ into the background photo picker on your Trello board, this one is the 3rd picture that comes up, but I highly encourage you to check out her other photos on her Unsplash profile, her eye for the smallest detail is breathtaking.
Then it was time for the lists.
Originally, I made lists for all the brands of nail varnish that I used; Superdrug, Boots, Maybelline, Rimmel etc, but there ended up being too many lists with just one or two cards in them for the more expensive, random or obscure companies.
So I needed to think of a way to organise the list - then it hit me - by the colour - obviously!
Why would I try and organise it in 2 different ways? I didn’t have the drawer set up by the brand, I ordered the drawer by colour! So, organise the Trello board by colour as well!!
Using the Chrome Extension Pro for Trello (that I have globally on all my boards), I changed the list colours to be similar to the colours that I was adding to them. Having a black list didn’t work though, because I couldn’t see the list name at the top, so I picked a dark grey. The embellishments list is turquoise because I don’t have any nail varnishes that colour and the additional lists for the files etc. are white.
Side note - if you’re trying to photograph something that rolls around, put a teeny bit of blue-tac under it to stick it to the table! Also, if you’re taking a picture of a load of things that are ‘the same’ (for a collection board), take photos on the same background (I took mine on the kitchen table), that way the background colour will be pretty similar and whatever the colour of the bottle, it will give you a better idea of the true colour! Try and keep the same lighting if you can, not always possible, but worth a try!
To get this board looking exactly how I wanted it, this is the process that I went through on my iPhone using the native Trello iOS App:
- I opened the board
- I went to the right list
- I went to the bottom of the list and clicked ‘add card’
- I expanded the card by clicking on the little arrows
- I clicked ‘add attachments’
- I clicked ‘take photo’
- I took a photo
- When I was happy, I selected ‘Use Photo’ (obviously this isn’t a nail varnish!)
- I entered the shade colour and number as the title (because this was easier to use as a title and way easier to find when I was in a shop!!)
- I clicked ‘labels’ and picked the correct brand so that there’s a tick in the label list (if it was a brand that I didn’t have on there yet, I clicked the + sign, picked a colour and added the brand name)
- Then I clicked X
- If I had more than one of the same shade, I put how many I had in the quantity custom field
- I clicked on the photo on the back of the card, clicked the 3 little dots and selected ‘Make Card Cover’
- I clicked ‘save’
- And ended up with cards like this:
That’s it, believe me, it actually took longer to write it all down than it does to actually do it!
Side note - the photos that I take within the Trello app on my phone, don’t save to my camera roll. I can’t remember if this is a setting that I changed way-back-when, or if this is standard/default! Just thought that I would point that out!
For the first 2 lists, I also attached a personal description and links to purchase them etc:
And I ended up with a spiffing board that looks like this:
If you want to create a collection board for something, it’s really easy, for anything you collect! The wonder of Trello is that it’s totally customisable, and ever-evolving, what might work for you on a specific board today, could well change in the future, and Trello can adapt to that without a problem!
Remember that everything in Trello is an experiment, some things work and some don’t, and that’s ok! That’s the beauty of Trello, try something, try something else, go back to the original, tweak it, get the board looking exactly how you want it, and everything falls into place!
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Esme Crutchley
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Systems Designer, Business Coach
Esme Crutchley
UK
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