How to create a moodboard?
During my career I’ve created moodboards of all kinds: for brands, apps, posters, shirts… you name it, but often I found the process intimidating because I was missing steps here and there, or got smashed by the client at a late stage, so I’ve decided to create an article with a collection of tips and tools.
*I walk you through it by working on a made up brand exploration
What is a moodboard?
Some people call it style tiles, visual tiles or stylescapes all with arguable differences, but all in all it’s a collection of images, which comes together to represent the visual direction of the brand (or project) will take.
We can summarize the moodboard’s role into three main goals:
— Sets the stage for the visual design process
— It establishes the visual world the brand will live in
— Provides with a visual standard to check the work against later
What’s the process of “moodboarding”?
The #1 mistake I did during my early projects after received the (very short) brief was that I went wild immediately and started collecting images, which I was thinking matching the brand without a single question. Very painful mistake.
Instead, take your time first analyze the brief, and make yourself truly understand the brand’s background, history, future plans, industry, competition, target audience, brand message and value proposition. If any of these missing don’t bother yet with moodboarding, go back to your client and clarify the missing details first (unless you just feel lucky 😬). A brand questionnaire targeting these missing details sent over can prevent you from starting over.
Assuming you’ve collected all the information from the client, now we’re ready to move further with the actual steps of the moodboard creation:
1. Research and image gathering
2. Preparation and layout
3. Presentation to the client (optional)
In the following sections, we’ll take a look at each of the steps, by using an imaginative brand.
Research and image gathering
Before I jump into any kind of online tool, I like to place the adjectives or any kind of words / details from the brief in front of myself, so I’m able to do a sense check if the researched material resonates with them.
** I’ve found this tool really helpful to come up with brand adjectives, but this should optimally come from your client’s brand questionnaire and / or the brief.
Before we talk research, I want to just share a couple of options for image collection that I like to use e.g. TOOLTIME 🛠
Pinterest is pretty much one of the go-to tools for image collection. Many of you probably already have accounts as well. The advantage is it’s easy to set up a secret boards (for free).
I like to use it together with the client, since they’re also (mostly) aware of the interface, so there is no learning curve sharing designs and receiving feedback directly (by using hearts ❤️) in one place.
Probably mostly due to its simplicity and focus, in the recent years many designers switched their Pinterest boards for Are.na. There are no ads, likes and recommendations like other socially driven platforms, which is a great plus (especially if tend to procrastinate).
Earlier Jill wrote an amazing Medium article specific on this tool, if you’re interested to know more about the nitty-gritty.
My favorite option is Dropmark. Personally, I just prefer the user experience and the single purpose approach. They also have multiple plans available, including a free one, so I do recommend checking it out if you don’t have a preferred app just yet.
You can also just save directly to your desktop. But I like starting with an app, so when I’m finished the research process I can have a broad view of the collection, before I start doing any arranging.
A pretty new collection tool is called mymind, grassrooted by the designer Tobias van Schneider. It’s a browser extension which helps you save images, text, video, complete articles, products or whatnot by adding to one big collection (also available as a mobile app) using the little extension panel or just good ol’ right-click.
This is the tool for the less organized, because it automatically searches for connections between the saved materials and adds the tags, so in some ways miming is one big mountain of materials you gathered over the years, but unlike Pinterest it’s way more searchable.
Alright, enough of tools! Are you ready for some inspiration? We need to remember those fancy brand adjectives we’ve defined earlier (industrial, determined, ethereal, etc.) before the start searching.
Because I know the searching process can suck me into a rabbit hole the first thing is to set myself a timer (for me 1.5 hour works mostly).
My weapon of choice is Google and Pinterest at first to see the kind of images popping up, so I can create some quick visual references to save on the selected platform. If I’m not happy I just do the same crawling but maybe on a different platform (on platform tips later in the article). It’s important not to limit yourself to anything at this stage and save everything that catches your eye so you have plenty of materials to work with.
I’m focusing on some key elements to show the clients (or myself) and inform design decisions later: colors, typography, overall context of the industry and vibe, packaging, photography (just not from the competition 😁), illustrational styles, textures, patterns and finally logos.
It sounds easy, but what if the brand adjectives are not leading anywhere?Here are some tips to try:
💡 Search for similar terms (instead of organic it could be natural, biological or living). For example in case of Solomo at first I was trying to search for functional, but that was leading to boring office places, so instead I tried to look around for synonyms.
💡 I know it might sound a bit crazy, but for me it also helps if I step away from the computer and just close my eyes to see what do I visualize when I hear the word. Say it out loud!
💡 If you and the client also has the time, it might be a good idea to even do this exercise together in the same spot or online through Miro or Figjam, because then they will feel more involved.
Extra resources for boosting the visual search:
— Designspriration — general purpose search
— PICDIT — general purpose search
— Flickgraphics — artsy things and typography
— Adult Art Club — photography and mood
— Dayinthelandofnobody — photography and mood
— Visualgraphic — typography
— typophile — typography
— logos.ai — typography and logos
— Type01 — typography
After you’ve collected a bunch of image, in the next section we’ll take a look what to do with them.
Layout and refinement
1. Choose a platform (Canva, Figma, Miro, etc.) to assemble the images into a presentable format. I recommend to pick something, which the client can easily use without installation, so feedback cycles are shorter. It’s good if the platform also has some theming options, so you can tailor it to the client’s brand colors for example and maybe re-use the same structure with a different one.
2. Culling and organizing the images
It’s practical to download each image onto the computer and organize them under the related tone or brand adjective each.
Pull out the favorites and cut them if only a partial of the image needed. If you’re having trouble to pull anything specific look at the organized groups and see if anything stands out.
3. Arrange images into a layout
When it comes to organizing these images, the first thing to keep in mind is color. We need to avoid the viewer spending too much time on individual objects instead of flowing naturally from one image to the other.
You can experiment with the number of images, for me 10–15 is a good starting point.
4. Review and finalize the board
Great work if you’ve reached this stage! Now it’s time to do the checkmarks against the initial brand adjectives to see if the moldboard overall communicates the brand vibe.
Questions to ask from ourselves:
— Is there anything the viewer might take too literally?
— Does the moodboard reflect the tone? (Check the brand adjectives one by one)
— Is there anything standing out too much?
— Does the context feel right the brand will live in?
If all considered done properly, it’s time for the moodboard presentation. Tap yourself on your shoulder because you’ve made a big step. Finally, I’ve collected some final notes, which might help you to present it to other people.
Presentation of your moodboard
How to communicate with the viewer about the moodboard?
Warn the audience not to take anything literally, none of the elements over the moodboard meant to be translated into one-on-one to their brand (or project). If for example there are purple Rubik cubes flying around on one image, it doesn’t mean the brand will do anything with a Rubik cube, but maybe the shape, maybe the color?
Emphasize this is the visual world where the brand lives in, not the exact elements.
All in all, encourage the client to focus on the whole, instead of the individual parts.
What if everything goes badly at this stage and the viewer hates it?
It’s time to go back to the brief, especially the tone part. It helps at this moment to go through each word together with the audience, and question if still the same words resonate with the brand vision.
If the answer is yes, then it’s better to have just another session to understand what the audience visualizes based on the words to match the expectations the next time. My experience is if the moodboard is curated together with the viewer or decision maket (for example on Pinterest) it’s easy to get an early buy-in to avoid this situation to happen.
If the answer is no, then probably something went off during the briefing (maybe given by a different person) and probably the best to explore if anything changed of the brand vision and go back to the beginning starting with the questionnaire. As much as this step seems daunting, client comfort is really critical otherwise they won’t feel ownership when you step further in the overall design process.
Thank you for reading so far! 👏 I hope the process was somehow folloable about creating a moodboard, but if not I’m happy to spend time to explain it further or answer any question within the comment section below. 🤓
Earlier I wrote some other UX related articles, which you might be interested.
