Your mood board will be a work in progress. Have you seen previous projects that resonated with you? What characteristics of your target audience are you trying to connect with? Include these sources of inspiration and use them to guide your search. Think about what made you want to take this direction with your project. While you’re trying to find your samples, don’t just make one image search and call it done. If you’re unsure what vibe you need to create, you may discover it in creating your mood board, but it will take longer. The clearer you are about what you’re looking for, the easier you’ll find it. Spend time on the following: Perfecting your vision To really shine, you’ll need to take the time to get the mood board right. How to make your mood board effective and visually appealing This is especially easy if you’re working with a digital mood board. However, if you plan to share it, try adding context and notes. If your mood board is just for you, you probably don’t need to explain your thinking. They can overlap, and you can crop them as needed to get them to the right size or to emphasize the element you want to showcase. From there, you can arrange everything around it, organizing by relationships between samples, hierarchy, and importance.Īs you work, feel free to make images work for you. Start by placing a key element at the heart of what you’re trying to convey on the board as an anchor. Organizing all the samples you collected will take trial and error. Once you’ve narrowed the samples, you should have a cohesive set of materials that creates the mood of your project vision. Consider the color palette, textures, and typography. When you’re beginning to collect the words, images, and other materials for your mood board, it’s a lot like brainstorming: You need to cast a wide net.
If you’re leaning digital, try Lucidspark for a flexible, collaborative space to brainstorm and create your mood board. You can include links and media clips and it’s easier (and often faster) to gather your materials together. However, digital mood boards have their own advantages. For example, you can include material samples for people to touch, like textiles or 3D objects. If you stick with an old-school mood board, you can include more than words and images.
Mood boards can be physical or digital, depending on your needs and preference. However, here is some general guidance: 1. The act of making one forces you to nail down just what you’re looking for in your project, which will help you get going on it quickly and without having to backtrack. Stakeholders are more likely to buy in if they get a clear idea of what you’re conveying, increasing your chances of success.Įven if the mood board is just for you, you still get the advantages of clarity and efficiency. For example, a mood board will empower partners to start on their project tasks without going in the wrong direction, saving you time. But put some images in front of them, and they’ll know exactly what you’re going for.īecause other people are more likely to understand your vision when they see a mood board, they’re a tool that will greatly benefit your team. When you’re trying to describe the way something should look or feel, it helps to visualize it.įor example, stakeholders could potentially get the vision of how a certain app should feel. Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words. For example, someone who works in marketing may use one to describe a brand. However, non-designers can use mood boards too. The most common use for mood boards is for designers to illustrate a style, such as an interior designer picking colors, materials, and example images to show the feel of the room they’re going to decorate or a photographer collecting images to show the style they need to achieve in a photoshoot. The creator makes a collage, whether physically or digitally, of words and images that together describe the feel of the topic. Mood boards are a way to show a general vibe or feeling about a particular topic. Keep reading to learn more about mood boards and how to create them. But a mood board can bridge the gap between the vision in your head and what others experience. This feeling that your project should generate can be hard to put into words, which makes planning for it and getting others’ buy-in difficult. You’re trying to elicit a certain response, and you need to know what exactly that response should be and how you will get it. When you’re planning a project-whether it’s writing a novel, launching an ad campaign, or running an event-you need to know how you want the project to make your audience feel.