Mood boards are an essential visual tool for any design and fashion project. It keeps the inspiration in place and serves as a project guide for all design teams. Today we share some tips about how to create the perfect mood board.
If you are willing to start a design project, you probably wonder how to express all your thoughts about it to the outside world. Mood boards are a classic design tool to show all the inspiration layers a design project requires.
Mood boards are intended to have an eye-catching design, be visually comprehensible and easily express design specifics. You can create mood boards from different perspectives and use diverse elements to reflect your ideas.
In project presentations, for fashion design, interior design, or lifestyle project assignments, it is practical to create engaging layouts to express and detail the main concept behind the collection or decoration project.
These are the key mood board elements you must include in your design presentation:
1. Develop a Creative Concept Beyond Aesthetics
Creating a mood board has to be a stimulating creative outlet. Try to find the right concept for your brand, fashion collection, or interior design project, it goes beyond collecting nice pictures and mashing them up together without a proper cohesive narrative explanation. A creative concept is not a theme, like flowers, sea, forest, instead, a concept is the union of creative elements from different sources, harmonized and edited to a weightier conceptual argument and aesthetic depth as a final result.
A creative concept can include cultural aspects, sports, cinema, philosophy, or music references, all integrated together; when the concept is ready, now we can work in specifics.
2. Select a Consistent Color Palette That Represents Your Project
Colors are an essential part of any design project. They set the tone and assign a certain “vibe” to the mood board. Colors can guide the inspirational images (we will comment on this later on) or vice versa. You can adjust and change the colors when developing the mood board; they can progress until the final layout.
3. Choose a Typography Series for Every Written Piece
The typography we select will communicate a tone; the choice will be present on every graphic, logo, and text element required. Font types are perceived differently from one typographic family to another; you need to balance intensity, clarity, and font aesthetic to make the best choice. Serif, Sans Serif, Script, Calligraphic, Display, are all examples of font types at your disposal, you should select the same font family to do combinations and experiment during the design process.
Integrate graphic icons matching the selected typography. This way, the graphics and font design will be harmonic and true to the original concept.
4. Create Textures and Prints According to Your Color Palette
Mood boards can be filled with textures, finished prints, and raw materials that uplift the final result. They are used to give depth and variety to a design presentation. Color blocks are great, but prints always inject dynamism and freshness into a project.
5. Tell a Visual Story With Inspiration Imagery
As if it were a movie, on a mood board you need to create a visual narrative. The image research will help you tell “the story” behind your project. Using inspiration imagery, you will bring emotions inside the mood board presentation. Evocative pictures are effective to portrait your general idea, then use detailed images to zoom in and describe the sensations. If you are developing a mood board for a pitch meeting, try to create video stills with those images, add some music and concise titles. These tools will help you showcase your story in the best way possible.
Working on a mood boards project is challenging and enjoyable at the same time. Pair your mood board layouts amongst a clear speech to explain to your audience the creative concept. A mood board is a flexible, highly-creative tool for you to communicate ideas and outline all aspects of your project. Do not be afraid to break the rules.
