I scrolled through my camera roll last week looking for a photo of the kid at the park. I found it eventually, somewhere between a screenshot of a font I spotted on a restaurant menu in Shoreditch, a screenshot of a colour palette from an app I've never used, a screenshot of someone's tweet about the death of RSS, and a screenshot of a beautifully laid out 404 page I stumbled across at midnight. The photo of the kid was outnumbered roughly four to one.
My camera roll is about forty percent screenshots. Maybe more. Photos of my son, my wife, our life in London -- all real, all precious, all hopelessly outnumbered by captures of things I saw on screens. Interfaces I admired. Typography that stopped me scrolling. Colour combinations that did something I couldn't articulate. Tweets that crystallised something I'd been thinking. App layouts. Website headers. Menu designs. Brand identities. Product pages. Error messages, for God's sake. I have screenshots of error messages because someone designed them well.
Nobody would understand this collection but me. And even I, scrolling through it, can't always remember why I captured half of them. But I know that when I took each one, something fired. Some small recognition. This matters. Save this. You'll need this. You probably won't need it, actually, but save it anyway because the act of noticing is the point.
The magazine instinct
I think this started with magazines. Growing up in Nottingham in the nineties, I was obsessed with magazines. The Face. i-D. Dazed. FHM. Loaded. Whatever I could get my hands on from the newsagent on the high street. I didn't just read them. I studied them. The layouts. The typefaces. The way a pull quote could change the whole feel of a page. The relationship between the image and the white space around it. How a contents page could be a design object in itself. I'd tear pages out and stick them on my wall. Not the articles necessarily -- the pages. The visual experience of them.
That's what the screenshots are. Torn pages. The digital equivalent of ripping something out of The Face and sticking it on your bedroom wall because it spoke to something you couldn't name. The medium has changed but the instinct is identical. You see something. It resonates. You capture it. Not to file it or study it or reference it later. Just to have it. To hold onto the moment of recognition before it slips away in the scroll.
What the collection says
If you were to go through my screenshots right now -- and please don't, it's deeply personal in a way that's hard to explain -- you'd see themes emerge. Patterns that I never consciously chose but that are unmistakably mine. There's a lot of dark interfaces. Clean type on dark backgrounds. Monospace fonts. Generous white space. Restrained colour palettes with one bold accent. Japanese design, everywhere. Monocle-level attention to detail. Error states that feel like someone cared. Navigation that disappears. Loading animations that someone spent three days on even though the user sees them for half a second.
These aren't conscious choices. I don't wake up and think "today I'm going to screenshot dark interfaces with monospace fonts." It just happens. The finger moves to the screenshot button before the conscious brain has finished processing why. And that unconscious pattern, that collection of instinctive saves, is more honest than any mood board I've ever assembled on purpose. Because mood boards are performed. You choose what goes on a mood board. Screenshots just happen.
When I built Modern Retro, the aesthetic didn't come from a brief or a strategy document. It came from years of screenshots. The warmth. The grain. The specific shade of brown that feels like the 1970s. All of that was living in my camera roll already, in screenshots of vintage packaging, old retail signage, faded colour palettes from design archives. I never sat down and researched the aesthetic. I'd been collecting it for years without knowing I was doing it.
Visual thinking is thinking
There's an assumption, particularly in strategy and business, that thinking happens in words. In decks. In bullet points and frameworks and two-by-two matrices. Fifteen years in advertising taught me to translate everything into language: the insight, the proposition, the creative brief. All words. And words are useful, obviously. But they're not how I actually think. I think in images. In textures. In the feeling of a layout. In the negative space between elements. In colour.
The screenshots are evidence of this. Every single one is a visual thought. Not "I should remember that this website used Helvetica Neue at 14px with 1.6 line height." That's what I'd write down if I was thinking in words. The screenshot captures something words can't: the overall feeling. The way the whole page holds together. The relationship between elements that creates an impression you can feel but not describe.
This is why I get frustrated when people ask me to explain my taste. "Why do you like that?" Because it feels right. "But what specifically?" All of it. The whole thing. The gestalt. I can break it down into components if you force me -- the type is good, the spacing is generous, the colour is restrained -- but the sum is greater than the parts, and the screenshot is the only format that captures the sum.
The personal museum
I've started thinking of my camera roll as a museum. Not a tidy one. Not the sort with proper lighting and little plaques explaining each piece. More like someone's attic, full of things they couldn't bear to throw away, organised by the logic of time rather than category. You'd need to spend a long while in there to understand the collector. But if you did, you'd understand them better than any biography could manage.
The screenshots from 2020 look different from the ones from 2024. The ones from last month look different from the ones from last year. Not because design has changed -- though it has -- but because I've changed. What catches my eye now is different from what caught it five years ago. The collection is a record of my visual evolution, laid down unconsciously, one screenshot at a time.
I keep thinking there's something to build here. Not just for me -- for anyone who thinks this way. A tool that takes your screenshots and finds the patterns. That shows you what you've been drawn to over time. That maps your visual taste the way Spotify Wrapped maps your listening. Because the data is already there, sitting in everyone's camera roll, mixed in with the photos of dinners and kids and sunsets. The unconscious record of what moves you, captured in the split second between seeing and screenshotting.
For now, it's just a folder. A messy, overstuffed, deeply personal folder on a phone that keeps warning me I'm running out of storage. But it's mine. Every screenshot in it is a moment where my brain said "this" without waiting for my conscious mind to ask "why." And that, I think, is as close to a definition of taste as I'm ever going to get. Not the ability to explain what's good. The inability to scroll past it.
