A guide to mood boards
What is a mood board?
Simply put, a mood board is a collection of images that helps to convey concepts and ideas visually to your clients or team. That’s it? Well… Not quite.
Mood boards can be digital or physical arrangement of visuals and they can vary from 10 to 30 images, or even more.
This visual positioning of images can include photographs, materials, textures, colour palettes, typography, and other related design elements that can convey a particular idea or concept to the viewer. This technique of visual representation is not utilised only in the graphic design field, but also in interior design, architecture, digital design and many others. Each field has their own requirements while creating a mood board. However, I will be focusing on its use in Graphic Design.
Before getting into visual examples and tips on creating the mood board, let’s understand the foundation leading to the mood board.
The purpose of a mood board
There are different situations when a mood board can be handy for designers.
Your definition of minimalist might be different from that of your client. By showing them visual examples of minimalist designs/elements, it can help them decide whether they want to explore such visual directions or not.
It can be as a source of inspiration for later stages of the project, finding the visual style, finding colour combinations or even maintaining the client’s expectations.
When working with clients, a mood board can help to visualize the ideas discussed during the strategy phase. Clients can sometimes experience difficulties expressing their ideas and this is where the use of a mood board can be practical.
Another advantage of using mood boards is that they can also help keep you focus and better define the visual direction.
How to create a mood board?
There is no single rule that dictates how a mood board should be constructed. This process depends on the designer and the task at hand. Mood board can vary in size, orientation (portrait/landscape), number of images, and so on. While we previously established that mood boards are collections of images, these images are not selected at random. There need to be a reason for including an image on your mood board. Remember that you might be presenting this to your client or other team members.
So where do you start?
Find out key words that represent your client/project. Usually, this should be established during strategy talks and previous discussions with your clients. Once this is established, you can start looking for inspiration from the internet, magazines, photograph references, etc. The good thing is that you are not limited by the type of visuals that can be included in the mood board- textures, materials, colours, photographs, and illustrations amongst others.
There are different formats that can be used for mood boards and different arrangement of visuals to facilitate the viewer’s interpretation (templates can be downloaded at the end of this article). Although mood boards are usually presented in landscape format, you can explore other ways of creating your own.
Example
Now that we have covered everything, let’s have a look on how you can structure your mood board to reflect particular styles.
01. Coffee shop being described as rustic (defined, rustic style is a design emphasis on rugged, natural beauty. It embraces nature-inspired textures, simple and earthy colors, and ultimately an unpretentious, organic warmth), warm, welcoming and cozy.
02. Real estate agency described as minimal, high contrast, bold and luxurious.
Tools to use to present your mood board to your client
1. Milanote where you can easily annotate and share your mood board.
2. Pinterest is quite popular with designers to get started with their project. Pinterest offers a variety of images on the platform itself.
3. Evernote can help with creating notes for different projects that you undertake (easy to include images).
4. Canva which provides templates and stock photos to get you started.
5. Adobe XD
Conclusion
As shown in the previous examples, mood boards are important to give a particular direction to the project. It also helps both parties understand each other while working and can avoid unnecessary revisions later in the process.
You can build your mood board using digital tools available or even create physical ones for your project. It all depends on how you want to present initial concepts to your clients.
Additional resources
You can find a vector template consisting of 5 boards that can be downloaded for free by clicking on the button below.
