Top Reasons to Make a Mood Board
Get ready to fall in love with mood boards––because we have, and we’re never looking back. At Fearless, we make one at the beginning of most big projects, including our forthcoming rebrand. Mood boards are a constructive, creative tool to help you:
Visualize your ideas
Anchor your project and keep things consistent
Build a better relationship with the client, and empower them to get involved
Make sure everyone is on the same page before delegating tasks
Kickstart complex campaigns and/or rebrands
“Mood boards are the perfect jumping off point for any design project,” advises Sampleboard, a blog for designers by designers. “Creating a mood board allows you to collect thoughts, ideas, color schemes, and moods in one place and define a coherent design concept without risk of losing sight of the bigger picture.”
Excerpts from the Fearless photoshoot for our rebrand.
Tackling big projects––like full company rebrands––is emotionally taxing. It involves a lot of mental and physical work, but it also triggers a wide range of feelings. Creating physical or digital mood board is a fantastic way to get all your ideas into one positive, inspiring place and make you feel confident in the direction you’re going.
Mood boards serve as a great way to keep projects on track––and even expedite them. “Spending sufficient time on the mood board phase can result in a project that runs more smoothly,” writes Cameron Chapman for Toptal.
As mentioned above, we recently used digital mood boards to map out style, photography, and overall vibe inspiration for our company rebrand photoshoot. Being able to reference this board leading up to, and during, the shoot was central to keeping the imagery aligned with our end goal aesthetic.
We also created a mood board for our Pricing for Prosperity course book. “Mood boards are...an excellent way to refine a project’s style before diving into the actual design process.” continues Chapman. “They’re a much lower investment than mockups and prototypes in terms of resources and time and can convey a lot about the look and feel of the final design.”
Excerpts from the mood board that helped guide the course book design process.
Pages from the finished course book.
Mood boards can be physical or digital. If you’re having trouble getting starting, think about including any or all of the following:
Images
Meaningful words
Fonts, signs, or logos
Colors
Quotes
Textures
Queues or explanations that explain the why behind your choices
Mood boards are excellent communication tools and make collaboration easier with clients. “It’s easy to misread someone’s expectations, especially if the person hasn’t been very precise,” continues Sampleboard. “What one person considers ‘minimal,’ another might call ‘sterile.’ To avoid such a scenario, start creating mood boards at early stages of the project.”
Whether you’re working with a client, or on something for your own business, create mood boards to get started. Don’t be discouraged if you need to swap out original pieces to the board, make edits, or start over completely! Mood boards are fluid and––most importantly––meant to be fun.