A mood board acts like a mind map for visual elements.
It's a great way to collect and display our inspiration
to focus and communicate our design ideas.
In this lesson, we explore different styles of mood boards,
why they're useful to the design process, and how to get started with a template.
A mood board is a central place where we collect and display our design inspiration
for a specific design project.
It's the visual representation of our brainstorming session.
It also lays the foundation for the overall theme of our design.
This collage of ideas can include illustrations,
colors, photographs, textures, and descriptive words.
When they all come together, they demonstrate the visual direction of our project.
One thing to remember, not all mood boards look the same.
Two designers working on the same project may end up with quite different mood boards.
We can tailor them to look however we like, arranging these elements in our own way.
As long as it speaks to us and helps us communicate our ideas to others
well, it's doing its job.
A mood board allows us to create with clarity.
When we organize our elements visually,
we can see what elements work well together and what elements clash.
It also helps us break down our project into sections that link back to our design brief.
This means we can show our friends, colleagues, and clients.
We can all agree on a single vision from the beginning of our design process.
It's easier to have these discussions about creative direction before the
work is carried out and before money and time have been spent.
In other words, the time you put into creating a mood board
at the start of your project could save a lot of time and money further down the road.
How do we begin to collate our flood of ideas?
Firstly, we think about the audience we want to reach.
Then we work backwards constructing a mood board
with the colors and elements we think they'd like to see.
Then it's time to explore.
Whether working from a formal design brief or a personal project,
we can start having fun with research.
We hunt for photographs, colors, words,
and textures that support the ideal look and feel of our future design.
When William Yarbrough started a personal branding project,
he wanted to replicate the style of the golden age of air travel in the 1950s and 60s.
So he found original materials from the era like postcards and luggage tags,
which offer great ideas for typography and color pairings.
This mood board is for a user interface project, but working off a fresh, light, airy, visual
direction, it draws from a wide variety of sources for inspiration from food packaging to fine art.
Just because something is from a different genre than your project
doesn't mean you can't use it to help establish the direction of your design.
Nothing is off limits.
Once we collect a range of elements we're happy with,
it's time to sort through them and choose which ones make it onto our final mood board.
One way to keep our mood board looking consistent is with a color palette.
A color palette can unite our ideas into a central theme.
When creating our mood board, we can include colors that match our vision.
Uploading photographs into a color palette generator
gives us a selection of specific colors to use in our mood board.
We can also work in reverse discovering color palettes we like, then finding images to match.
We can include color palettes in our mood board too.
Here the designer is inspired by vintage colors like emeralds and golds.
This mood board has been populated with photographs, logos, and typography.
You can start to see these elements give an impression of the project's style and message.
See how the words like vintage and luxurious match the mood and colors.
There are many ways to display a mood board when we package our references into a template
we come up with a preview of our future design.
A physical mood board can be as simple as a wall covered in photographs, illustrations, and samples
but a digital mood board should look clean and organized.
People view the digital in a different way so you need to curate the experience for them.
Existing templates are designed to display our final selection of inspiring elements.
Each element will fit comfortably in the template without looking overcrowded.
This designer used one simple template to create three mood boards
each showing a different concept for the same project.
Even though the elements change, the template remains basic.
It always gives room for one large picture overlaid with a logo,
two smaller pictures to highlight the style, and the color palette
see how each template combines the elements into a different feeling.
Here a designer created an initial mood board, but after the client requested a few minor tweaks,
the board ended up a completely different aesthetic much more to the client's liking.
You'll notice the first concept is light, bright, and slightly nautical.
The second, while it shares some of the same images,
is darker with a more sophisticated, retro look.
Because it was a digital template, it was an easy change.
Don't think you need to fit everything onto one mood board either.
To help a client define their organization's visual style,
this designer created three mood boards all with different directions.
One with specific graphic elements that match the theme such as patterns, color schemes, and fonts.
And the other features publications that have used a similar style.
You can get a real sense of the direction here. The combination of warm tones, traditional type,
and the use of texture suggests a professional aesthetic that remains informed by the human hand.
Let's look at one more.
This one is pulling from a tradition of corporate design that emphasizes cool
tones and clean lines to convey a strong and modern aesthetic.
The fonts are simple and slender complemented by a Serif body font to reinforce the emphasis
on credibility and trustworthiness.
Would you believe both of these boards are for the same client and the same project?
You can imagine the final outcome would be very different
depending on which board the client chose to follow.
A mood board might also represent an overall look or provide options for specific elements.
Here examples of website buttons take up a big portion of the template.
However, this template could easily be replicated
to show a second range of button styles or the same style in different colors.
At the end of the day, mood boards remind us where our ideas came from.
Referring back to our mood board
will guide us back to our original vision the one the client agreed upon.
That way, we keep aligned with the goal through every step of our design journey.