You or your clients might have your research, personas, values and mission statements completed, and think you’re now ready to start creating logos, building websites and going full force to market. But not so fast.
Overlooking the mood board is a critical misstep. It’s a powerful tool for bringing stakeholders together around a tangible vision of what the brand can and will represent to customers.
What is a mood board?
Mood boards exist to help us align on a direction for design. They are a collection of borrowed design elements — fonts, color palettes, photo and icon styles, web UI screen grabs — that establish a preliminary look and feel. Each mood board should evoke a different feeling and personality, capturing one or more brand values. There is no right or wrong direction in picking one.
Types of mood boards
There are two principal approaches to mood boards: brand and web. Brand mood boards set the course for the entire brand experience. Web mood boards are more focused on a website’s user interface elements.
Brand mood boards define the look and feel of the company. Web mood boards reflect how people should feel when they visit a website. While they resemble brand mood boards, web mood boards include essential website elements such as buttons, screenshots and image treatments.
What makes a good mood board?
A mood board can have multiple different elements, but there are some guidelines you can use to ensure your mood board hits the mark.
• Too much imagery is overwhelming. Too little won’t provide direction.
• Whether it’s the marketing team or the C suite, keep the audience in mind.
• Consider colors, artwork, images, fonts — anything and everything that conveys mood.
• Stay focused.
Even though the goal is to create a design that seems inevitable — even effortless — building a strong, unique brand doesn’t just happen overnight. Mood boards are a great way to temperature-check what stakeholders actually want. Up to this point, defining brand values can seem like an abstract exercise. Creating mood boards is the first step in bringing a tangible direction to the representation of brand values. Mood boards inform the development of brand guidelines and are an efficient way to get stakeholder buy-in without spending hours of design time. They help to refine the client’s visions and goals, and can serve as the foundation for a more complete set of guidelines that will serve as the source of truth and inspiration for all future creative work.
Tip: We usually present two mood boards to a client, sometimes more. Each mood board is intentionally different, with some focusing more on an evolution of the current brand and others taking a more revolutionary approach. This helps clients decide whether they want to maintain continuity with their current brand or are looking for something more radical.
Mood boards create intention. Instead of spending time deliberating over the general look of each print ad, web page or brochure, marketers can use the selected mood board to guide the process, bringing more effective messages to market faster. Before any direction is finalized, the mood board organizes and presents options.
Mood boards provide direction. Individual elements on a mood board are not to be taken super literally as a conclusive design decision. Initially, the mood board should be looked at holistically for the atmosphere it evokes and the feelings it activates. Personality and emotion are essential to the evaluation and use of mood boards. They offer are an avenue to travel down, not an exact address. Mood boards can be refined and elaborated on in print and digital marketing collateral. They can be a source of inspiration and reference when putting together and finalizing the brand guidelines.
Mood boards create and channel inspiration. Far from confining designers to a particular set of colors, fonts and image styles, the exercise of creating, selecting and refining a mood board gives the entire creative team the freedom to do its best work across the brand. Like the colors mixed on a master artist’s palette, the mood board helps inspire the work that is to come. It suggests solutions to every visual design problem and even influences the tone and style of copy — all while ensuring a uniform approach that helps to make the brand and what it stands for instantly recognizable.
We believe in mood boards as a powerful tool to help our clients envision the best expression of their brand — and then bring that vision to life. If that’s an appealing prospect, let’s get started discovering all that your brand is capable
