How to Create a Mood Board for Your Brand
Creating a mood board is a crucial step in designing a brand’s visual identity… but it’s often unclear what its actual purpose is, what elements it should include (spoiler: they’re not just random images), or what to do with it once it’s ready.
If you're working on your branding with a designer, you should have a good understanding of what it is and what it's for, because that will help you better evaluate the mood board she presents to you during the design process. And if you're doing it yourself, I still highly recommend that you take the time to create a mood board for your brand and do so strategically.
Since the mood board is a fundamental part of the design process and should be created with a clear purpose and strategy in mind, in this post I’ll explain in detail how to create one that truly helps build a powerful visual identity.
What is a mood board?
A mood board is simply a board used to define the visual style of a project using various graphic elements. Here, I’ll mainly be discussing how to use it for a branding project, but it can also be used for interior design or a photo shoot.
A mood board, as the name suggests, is a board used to define the visual feel of something—the emotions it conveys—to inspire its creation.
Most of the mood boards we see these days are digital (and in this post I’ll be focusing primarily on that type), but the reality is that they’ve always been made using magazine clippings, paper, and even fabrics, fibers, or natural elements—pieces of paper colored with pencils or watercolors, or anything else that helps you draw inspiration for the project’s visual elements. If you have the space and materials available, creating a classic mood board can be a truly fascinating creative exercise.
Why Creating a Mood Board Is Important in the Branding Process
The first thing to do when you start working on a brand’s visual identity is to define its personality—how we want that brand to be perceived by its audience. This is completely abstract and intangible, because at this stage we’re working with ideas and concepts.
A mood board is exactly what will help us translate these abstract aspects of a brand’s personality into visual elements. With the mood board, we’ll visually bring the brand concept to life, and it will help us find graphic elements that represent that concept.
In addition, once the mood board is complete, it will serve as a guide or compass for creating all the other visual elements of the brand, from the logo to the website and stationery design.
Steps for Creating a Mood Board for Your Brand
1. Start with a concept
Everything we want to succeed or achieve its goal requires intention and strategy, and a mood board is no exception. When creating a mood board for your branding, you need to think strategically about your brand and your audience: Who is your ideal customer? What are the brand values that your customers should connect with and identify with? What overall message do you want to convey through your imagery? What is your brand story, and how does it connect with your audience’s aspirations and needs?
Before you start frantically searching for images just because they look nice, it’s important to sit down and think about your brand. This is one of the reasons why I always start my branding process with a questionnaire for my clients, which helps me understand all the strategic fundamentals (brand history, values, business objectives, target audience, competitive landscape, etc.) that will allow me to design a visual identity that truly represents their brand and, at the same time, resonates with their audience.
One of the most useful tools for linking this conceptual and strategic aspect with its visual representation is keywords. You can call them keywords, brand values, or many other things, but the point is to define about five words that capture the essence of your brand’s personality. Having these words, concepts, or values defined will help you, when searching for images and inspiration for your mood board, to do so with a clear sense of what you’re looking for and what you want to represent visually.
2. Time to find inspiration
Once you have a clear understanding of your brand’s concepts and strategy, and you’ve defined your five keywords, it’s time to start looking for visual inspiration. These days, one of the most convenient places to find this visual inspiration is Pinterest. What I usually do is create a private board on my Pinterest profile, where I save all the images that I think could help me develop the brand’s visual identity.
One of the things I recommend to my clients when we’re looking for visual inspiration is that they type each of the five words previously defined as the brand’s keywords into the Pinterest search bar. When you do this kind of search, you’ll often see images that have nothing to do with what you’re looking for, but you’ll also see images that visually represent the word.
Here's a tip for conducting this type of search on Pinterest that usually yields good results: search using English keywords, because the results are often more relevant than when you search using Spanish keywords.
But in addition to searching for these keywords, simply jot them down on a Post-it note, in a planner, or somewhere you’ll always see them when you’re looking for inspiration on Pinterest—and keep in mind that every image you save to your inspiration board should correspond to one of these five words. Also keep in mind that we aren’t always looking for a literal representation of these words; rather, what we need is to associate these abstract concepts with images that represent them. For example, if we’re looking for the word “joy,” we don’t necessarily have to save images of people laughing: focus also on finding images that convey joy to you, that have cheerful motifs.
Finally, when searching for visual inspiration, keep in mind that, in addition to photographs, you can also find inspiration here for fonts, line styles, geometric shapes, patterns, and more.
3. Final creation
Once you’ve collected enough images on your Pinterest board, the first thing I recommend you do is review everything you’ve saved. Generally, when we’re in the inspiration-gathering phase, we tend to save everything we come across that seems like it might work, but when we review all that material on the board later, certain images usually stand out that better align with what we’re looking for.
As you review your work, you’ll start to notice patterns—certain types of images you didn’t notice at first but that keep recurring, certain geometric shapes that also repeat, styles, fonts, and so on. At this point, I recommend that you start removing from the board anything you see that doesn’t fully align with the vision you’re building for your brand, and keep only the crème de la crème.
Once you’ve narrowed down your initial selection to the best options, it’s time to actually create the mood board. Not all the images you keep after this second round of selection will end up on the mood board, but this process of refining your choices is what will ensure you have a well-defined starting point.
Types of Mood Boards
Before you start putting together the mood board itself, I recommend thinking about what kind of board you want. Especially when we’re creating it digitally, we can more easily experiment with the arrangement and layout of the images, and we can create different types of mood boards:
Completely geometric
Irregulars
Grid type
With the color palette embedded, or as a separate file.
This is a matter of personal preference—it depends on how you visualize the layout best and how you want your mood board to look. So far, I’ve been creating geometric layouts with the color palette at the bottom, but I want to start experimenting with grid-based and irregular layouts as well.
What to Include in a Mood Board
At this point, what I usually do is download all the images from Pinterest to my computer and import them into a Photoshop document. In Photoshop, I have several mood board templates that I customize depending on the images I ultimately choose for each project.
I usually prepare two or three versions of the mood board, moving images back and forth between them, and adding or removing elements as I go. It’s a very dynamic, creative, and flexible process, but even though it’s not rigid, it’s important to always keep the brand’s keywords in mind to ensure that the final mood board we create is a visual expression of the concepts we defined as our starting point. Remember that the mood board is an element that serves a purpose in the design process; it’s a working tool, and therefore it must be created with a clear purpose and strategy behind it… though we can certainly have fun in the process, of course.
It’s also a good idea to include different types of graphic elements. This isn’t strictly necessary, but if you keep it in mind when selecting images for the mood board, it will help you in the subsequent process of designing your brand identity.
The mood board I created for Ingrid Fontana’s brand identity includes various graphic elements (such as hexagons) that were later used to design the brand’s entire visual style.
So, at the very least, I recommend including the following in your mood board:
A photo-realistic image
A graphic design image
An image of textures or graphic patterns
Any font
An image of geometric shapes
This way, you can be sure your mood board includes the essential elements that will serve as a visual guide when creating your brand identity— which is something broader and more comprehensive than just a logo.
Colors from the mood board
The final step in my mood board creation process is choosing the color palette. I’ll discuss how to create a harmonious color palette for your brand in another post, but for now, I recommend that you choose:
two bold colors (which will be your main colors),
two neutral colors (which will serve as your accent or secondary colors),
and an accent color (which is the color you'll use to highlight certain elements).
I usually do this using Photoshop’s color picker, extracting colors from the images on the mood board itself and then adjusting them individually until I achieve the exact shade I’m looking for. As I showed you earlier in the section on types of mood boards, you can include the color palette mixed in with the images, or keep it separate so it’s easier to see.
And there you have it—your mood board is ready. Remember, the more strategically you design it, the more useful it will be in the process of creating your visual identity.
When created with purpose and strategy, a mood board can serve as a very useful guide for developing all the elements of a brand’s visual identity and ensuring you stay true to the style you initially defined. This will help you maintain visual consistency in everything you create and achieve powerful branding.
