A mood board is a collage of pictures, text, colors, and shapes. Yes, it is the same thing you’ve already created in your school days. The only difference between a mood board and a usual collage is the balance or visual harmony in pictures, text, colors, and shapes.
Why do you need a mood board?
Mood board serve many purposes. You can use mood board for home decoration, wedding decoration or designing a website. But here I will specifically talk about mood boards from the perspective of creating a brand inspiration.
However, a mood board does more than that. Here are a few areas where a mood board would help your brand.
For inspiration
Mood boards inspire your company vision and mission. You can select pictures and colors that go well with your company’s vision and mission. You would like the images to communicate emotions that would strike the right chord with all the stakeholders.
Focus
With a mood board, your focus remains intact. You are only concerned with your image and communication with your audience. Your decisions regarding your image and messaging are not affected by what others say or what your competition is doing.
Consistency
A mood board helps you in maintaining consistency across all your branding efforts. It acts as a reference point right from designing your corporate identity to creating marketing campaigns.
Moodboard Ingredients
These are the different things you need to create a mood board for your brand.
Pictures
Ideally, a mood board should have pictures with similar hues, color balance, and emotions. You need to think what pictures would effectively communicate your brand to the end users. The images need to have a direct or indirect connection with how your audience’s emotions, and aspirations.
Colors
Next, you need to identify colors that would go well with your brand image. The colors could be those used in the pictures, or you can pick a color scheme from wherever you like. The photos and colors should go well together.
Text or fonts
Next ingredient is text that goes well with the pictures you have collected so far. You may not have an excellent knowledge of typography, but you can always use your gut instincts.
Patterns and shapes
Patterns and shapes can be seen all around you. Go with the theme of your brand and think of all the patterns and ways that go well with it.
Creating a mood board
Now that you know all the ingredients needed to create a mood board, you need to start collecting them. We have created a simple process to help you get started.
1. Google images
Start looking for google images with keywords that relate to your brand. These are not the keywords that relate to your industry but keywords that describe your brand to your end users. Like a fashion brand could use keywords like calm, bright, sensuous.
Depending on your keywords, you may get pictures of people, landscapes, objects, forms of art, buildings, quotes and other types of written text.
2. Save the pictures
When you search the images in google images, it shows you many options that help you further refine your search.
Here is an example. I have searched for the keyword “calm,” and it shows me some related options right under the search bar.
These options help me create different sets of pictures within a keyword.
Group the pictures by emotion or color and save them in separate folders on your computer.
At this stage, you may create as many folders you may like. If you spend a lot of time doing this activity, chances are you may have multiple folders with different sets of pictures. However, to keep yourself focused, try limiting yourself to less than five folders.
3. Creating mood boards
To create a mood board, you need to crop and collate from the saved sets of pictures. You will need a photo editing tool like, or you can also do it using your google old Paint.
You can also use free online tools like Canva to create a mood board. Creating a mood board with Canva is more comfortable, and gives you better results.
Below is an example of how a mood board looks like.
Image Source: Flickr
