What is a mood board and how do you create and use one?
What is a mood board?
A moodboard is an important tool in the creative process, and can be used at any stage of designing or planning.
If you’ve ever wondered how creatives know what colors, styles, music or products will work best together, the answer is probably moodboarding. Mood boards are tools that often help creative professionals like fashion designers, stylists, graphic designers, amongst other creative professionals to visualize the direction a project needs to go in and what the end product may look, feel or sounds like. It provides you with something you can reference when you’re trying to communicate the mood and the emotions expected from your goal/product.
What do you include on a mood board?
You use photos, sketches, words, and other visual elements to communicate a visual concept or idea and putting them together in a collage, which can be either digital e.g. in photoshop or physical e.g. usually a piece of poster board or foam board and is a collaborative effort by all involved to achieve the same, or similar, design vision. It allows you to present your ideas and create visual and conceptual connections between the various images used. As you’ve probably heard a picture is worth a thousand words and as a result people are more likely to remember a collection of information when it is presented in a visual format.
Using a mood board to communicate personality
Mood boards can range from the very general—for example, “I want my brand to feel fresh and bright”—to the very specific—”I want the logo to be a handwritten style in green and orange, with a hand-drawn feel.” The very best way to create a mood board is to start with your brand’s mission and desired personality. Is your brand sophisticated or playful? Traditional or trendy? Once you have defined your brand’s personality, you can start collecting images that reflect that vibe. An important part of a mood board is the notes.
Using a mood board as a creative tool
In a way, a moodboard is a visual representation of your creative process. It’s a way to visualize your ideas, research, and inspirations, and can help you to focus your work. A moodboard is a great tool to help you get your creative juices flowing, thanks to something called the Zeigarnik Effect i.e. an unfinished activity aids recollection. Mood boards let you experiment with color, texture and other elements of design.
It’s not just a collection or collage of pretty pictures. It’s not about the individual images, but about the feelings and emotions they evoke. A mood board is a tool that helps a designer to communicate their vision to others. It is a great way to share your creative intentions with others, so that your collaborators (whether they be clients, other designers, or your team) know exactly what you envisage.
On the basis of this you can see how it might be used to determine everything from the color and fit of a new line of jackets, to creating the outfits an actor wears in a film, to the cover art for a record.
Example of a mood board
What you see below is an example of a mood board we put together for a prototype womens shoe on a consulting project we were working on a while back. The brand wanted all the teams involved in the project to have a strong understanding of the kind of person the shoe was being made for, what their personality was, how they carried themselves, amongst other characteristics. The brand was aiming at the luxury market for a target consumer that was classic, driven, sophisticated and elegant. The shoe itself being something that could be worn both to a corporate meeting and on a night out with friends.
As you can see, there are many ways to create a mood board. Have fun experimenting and creating your own mood boards!
