I gave this post a lot of thought. After all, how many pragmatists out there believe in the strategy of visualizing one's life goals?

A Vision Board or as some people call it, a Dream Board is something that's based on the "˜Law of Attraction'. The "˜Law of Attraction' says that whatever you think of with focused intent, comes true with time.

A vision board quite simply, is a collage of pictures, stuck up as a poster or in a scrapbook. Each picture that goes into the project when you make your own vision board stands for something you want in your life.

Like a picture of your dream house, or an ideal vacation you want to take. The thought behind the whole process is that, the more specific you are with your vision of what you want to achieve, the better your chances of grasping it one day.

On one level, the concept of a vision board can be cast away as pseudo-psycho babble. But creating collages or stringing together pictures to illustrate something specifically have always been a part of our learning process. We learnt it as kids. It's only as adults we have forgotten the goal setting power that can be in an image.

So how do we do away with the scissors and glue for a digital version of a vision board?  Let's try to make our own vision board with a free software called Ript.

Ript is a freeware tool that's actually meant to rip images and text from the web and your computer as easily as you can cut them out from your favorite magazines. Ript is quite a serious tool for collecting and collating information that's all around in our digital world. As the homepage of the site mentions, Ript is part scrapbook, part to-do list.

That's just the combo we need to use Ript as a visual goal setting tool. But first a few basics on Ript :

Ript can grab any type of image from a webpage or any other file, text from all kinds of files and individual frames from Flash movies. So, that means we can screen grab everything apart from full videos.

This is how Ript looks like on our desktop. The main interface is called the Tabletop "“

The Pile is the tool for capturing content. To rip an image (also called a scrap), click on the image and drag it to the Pile. To rip a block of text from a webpage, or from a file on your computer, highlight the text and drag it to the Pile. A new text scrap can be inserted anywhere (without ripping anything) by typing the text.

Image and text scraps can be used to create as many Pages as we want. Pages can also be printed or shared with friends (as JPG or as a RIPT file) via an email. Pages are also viewable in The Light Box that's the area down below.

Making My Own First Vision Board

I have a dream of travelling around the world. So let me just travel around the virtual world and grab a few dreamy pictures of the places I would like to go to. My first stop - Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown, New Zealand. I get the image from Flickr into my vision board by simply dragging it into the Pile tool that's on the bottom right corner of the desktop.

With the scrap on my first page, I can resize, rotate, change the location or sort the scrap(s) in any which way. But first, let me add some information about the place by clicking on the little Info icon. Ript flips the image over.

I can rename the image name and add my own descriptive notes in the Notes box. Ript also saves the link of the source file.

Ripping several images gives me a vision of vacationing in New Zealand to think and dream about. Adding a few lines of text can make it a bit more descriptive. The zoom slider can be used to blow up the pictures on the page. That's it"¦my first vision board is ready.

The idea of using Ript as a vision board is just one that came from the top of my head. As originally intended, Ript is a very useful tool to gather information and arrange it like a corkboard. The simple drag and drop style of gathering content makes it a rapid tool for lumping together information.

Ript is in beta, so there will be some desirables from users like you and me.

An addition of text formatting functions would be a notch for user control. I sometimes also kept wishing that I could grab the screenshot of an entire page. Or, how about a slideshow feature as the tool is built around collecting images so slickly?

The list of desirables is growing longer so here are the limitations that come with the software right now.

Ript works best with Internet Explorer. With Firefox, problems arise while ripping frames from Flash movies. But as Ript is in Public Beta right now, these creases should be ironed out with time.

Let us know if you have cared to make your own vision board for your life goals and where you see Ript fitting in.

Ript (Beta) is a 8.7MB download for Windows XP and Vista.

Image Credits: geoftheref, gak, jorgazmo