What is the use of a mood board? What is a mood board exactly?

Mood boards are something that you may or may not witness when working with your designer. I personally don’t show my clients my mood boards but I sometimes have one at the beginning of a project. Especially brand identity projects.

Mood boards aren’t just for groups of people collaborating on a project by the way, they are even extremely useful for singular designers working on a singular project alone.

It’s very frequently how I commence a project and I pull it together after reading the design brief I have compiled together with the client. The design brief verbally sets the scene for the planned company brand ethos and then I pull together a mood board in my design software which visually inteprets the ‘feel’ of the ethos the company wants to present to the world in visual format.

ie….For a new business I have to translate their planned brand behavior into a brand visual and my mood board is very akin to a ‘brainstorm’ if you will of the ‘feel’ of the company … just it’s essence, before anything is actually pinned down.

Here is a mood board of mine from just last week:

Now this particular mood board was created because I was designing a new brand identity for a veterinary practice and I picked out from the design brief that it was vital to get across the following in the design;

- An old fashioned sense of ‘whimsy’

- Illustrative designing featuring a dog, cat, rabbit

- Details of the surgery interior included the green colour paint square you see in the middle, and the likely furniture style was also described…which I shoved into the mood board (the chair and table) to ensure my design matched the feel of the interior of the practice.

-To appeal to high net worth customers.

Keeping On Track With The Design Brief

I also often have at the top of the mood board a list of sentences, and/or words that I need to consider very seriously when designing so that I don’t forget the vital key points of the design brief.

If you can imagine, it’s pretty easy to start accidentally straying from the design brief whilst designing for hours and so it makes sense to keep the key points right in front of you on the art board in written and visual format in the form of the mood board.