Mood boards can be a great way to get your ideas across to your client, get early sign off and work through ideas prior to your design or web job. Just follow some of the advice below to save you time and headache.
So today is all about Mood boards – why you do them, what they are, how to make one and how they can help. If your needing to get your ideas across to your client, a fellow worker or even your designer boss a mood board can set the tone and take all that fluffy stuff (that’s hard to articulate and crammed into your head) and give clean direction on where you want to take the design project. Professional designers, graphic, fashion or interior will piece together a single pane artwork infusing textures, images and text related to a design concept as a reference. This reference point also be a great place to come back to if you are stuck anywhere along the process.
Another point to take on board is that through out the design process of a clients brand, website, marketing material – whatever project, there will multiple hands at work. A mood board can be easy to pass along the style and theme without having to relay the info every time. This is where Chinese whispers are not your friend. Anyway enough about how they are great – on to how to make them. They can be a pain to create, with hours spent looking over websites, image galleries, books and magazines for that perfect picture just to sum up a tiny increment of your board but they are worth it. Also here are a few tips to make the job a little less like a, well, job.
01: Get outside the digital world: Open a newspaper, magazine, go outside and take you own images. It’s often easy just to go straight to Google images but there is a whole word out there. A real world experience can be a strong negotiator when discussing this board with a client.
02: The general drift: It’s aways good to remember that the stuff you leave out is as important as what you put in. It’s easy just to throw things in that you might think work to get the job done, though finding the right elements can make of break a great mood board. You will have heaps of ideas, heaps of images, text and other material – just add what is important and what works.
03: Have an idea in mind and work around one image: Key images will be the basis for you mood board. Make sure they are strong consistent. It’s good to have idea in mind when you start – whether it’s something you have seen before or a creation of a mixture of things it’s important to have a starting point.
04: Get creative: Cut things out, dress things up, cover things in paint, glue and other fancy things. Your mood board is an attempt to extract all the things, running around your brain that need to get out. Don’t keep things locked up – let them run free.
05: Make sure your idea is obvious: Use touch points to help the mood and direction come across clearly. You want to use a text similar to you dogs hair, bring in your dog – well maybe not that extreme, though you get my drift. The client/co-worker is trying to understand you thought process, make it as clear as possible.
Now that you have everything in order, how do you take that and make it work for you? Whilst this part is daunting there are a few tricks to help the process work better for you and keep you one the good side of you client or work co-workers.
01: Be in on the delivery: Make sure that you are part of the delivery process. You created it, make sure you get the chance to own it. A project manager may think they should be the one to present it, though they were in your head, so only you are the best person for the job.
02: Hold off the surprise: Sometimes a project-manager/coordinator think’s good idea to email the mood board to the client ahead of time ‘so they know what your presenting’. Better to hold off and let the mood board surprise the client in it’s awesomeness. This will also give the client less time to think about what they are going to say about it.
03: Speak casual and look for reactions: Keeping your cool and speaking calmly shows you have confidence about the board and the direction you’re heading. Also looking at the clients reactions can help you gauge how you’re going. Keeping a calm exterior at this time is hard, though if you can pull it off will work brilliantly. Just don’t get rattled and be confident about what you’re presenting.
04: Get a quick signoff: Get a response from the client asap. If they have time to go outside and ponder the ideas, the concept will be lost or at least disguised in all the other outside noise. Try and aim for a yes or no there and then. Even if it’s a no, you can work from there. If it’s a yes, well you’re laughing and you can get your web or graphic design project started asap. Another idea is to think about using mood boards for other projects other than just pitches. websites, branding, marketing material – this can be a sure fire way to get some good ideas rolling quickly and signed off by the client.
05: Use the board to brief the design team: Mood boards are great way to show creative and theme ideas. Simply giving this mood board to a designer will show where you are heading. Also the more content the better. One or two designs won’t give a designer much detail, though 10-15 will. Especially when they are all related.
In conclusion, there are thousands of ideas out there and day by day concepts are becoming harder and harder to come up with. Things likemood boards, inspirational artwork and other great visual devices help declutter the world of unoriginality. Keep on using these great techniques and the world will be a better designed place.
Signing off, Max Schindler
Chief editor and copy writer for Xmarx.
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