Mood boards are standard among many creative workers, not only designers. Individuals fill mood boards (digital or physical) with numerous things, such as images and varied textures, to visualize thoughts and notions. Mood boards are a kind of mashup or a collage of different photography, textures, color palettes, logo, stamps, etc. It paints a picture of the direction that you need to follow. It allows us and the clients to collaborate to get the final vision right before you start. So here you will see what mood boards are, the aim of having them, what a mood board should contain, their benefits, how they can be created digitally, and what tools can help you beautifully design your own mood boards. So, without any further delay, let’s dive right in.
What Exactly Are Mood Boards?
A mood board is a visual tool commonly used by designers that comprises photos, text, and object samples in a composition that helps to visually show the style they want to follow. It expresses your concept and visual inspirations. A mood board may be utilized for competitive analysis and to establish the fundamentals of the ultimate product. It facilitates the cooperation of many ideas by depicting their expectations. It aids in avoiding any misconceptions that may arise during the beginning stages of the task.
What Should a Mood Board Include?
A mood board can feature anything that clearly helps you communicate your ideas and feelings. It may include the following:
Pictures – Images are an excellent technique to explain yourself clearly.
Color Palette – Choose and display a color palette that you will highlight in your mood board since colors attract people.
Topology and Fonts – This may help you demonstrate the visual attractiveness of your design.
Benefits of using Mood Boards
For all digital designers who might be doubting the effectiveness of using mood boards, here are some reasons why one should use mood boards.
A fundamental source of inspiration
Finding inspiration anytime you get lost will always allow you to refocus your attention on the same thing by remembering why you started it in the first place. Nowadays, the internet is extremely disturbing. Social media sites like Instagram and Twitter increasingly focus on video content, memes, and hot topics. They disturb your thoughts. When making your mood board, it is critical not to limit your search to a single location. You never know when someone’s meme can inspire a thought that will evolve into a different outcome. So, you need to keep it safe!
Simple to create
Mood boards do not have to adhere to any particular format. This allows us to build them any way we see fit. It empowers producers to be more imaginative with each creation by allowing creators to think more openly. A mood board allows you to quickly express a wide range of thoughts and sentiments that are crucial to your presentation but harder to describe orally.
Easily attract clients
You can rapidly identify the visual approach that the customer appreciates by providing mood boards. You can focus on what made the client more comfortable with your ideas by keeping the style and aesthetic of the project consistent with the client’s goals and expectations.
Saves time
It allows you to comprehend more correctly what your customer wants from you without wasting time. This implies that your solution to a visual interface brief will almost certainly differ from that of other designers, which is fantastic! It’s crucial to be accessible to document your thoughts and techniques as and when you want.
Enhances your vision
Mood boards make it less intimidating to begin a project since they are meant to improve your vision. After creating a mood board, you will be left with a composition of your project’s defined themes.
Maintains project objectives
When you have a creative mind, distractions are prevalent. Mood boards can help you avoid these and keep you focused on your client’s needs by reminding you what the final result will look like.
Collaboration is more straightforward
Mood boards make it easy to interact with your clients by showing them what the result will look like and allowing everyone involved to agree on a direction even before starting the work. It also allows the team’s creativity to flow to get the best designs out of the session.
Useful on the Front End
Front-end developers may benefit significantly from mood boards. They assist users in illustrating their experiences on the board by utilizing numerous items that will readily communicate their point of view.
How Can Mood Boards Assist?
Continue reading to discover why you should think they are essential to your business. Here are a few reasons that will make it clear how mood boards can assist you.
Encourages inventiveness
We’ve discovered that creating mood boards allows you to experiment with design components rather than get into the layout. It allows you to do a market analysis and evaluate which styles are appropriate for that specific customer and their sector.
Enables greater client collaboration
The mood board stage in any approach is frequently the portion clients say they enjoy the most, and with reason. You get to discuss what colors appeal to their target demographic and what graphics work best. It allows your clients to provide feedback on the layout before getting too far into the process. It’s the time to test new things and find what works well before it’s too late. Your customers will appreciate being allowed to participate in these choices since it makes the process seem more collaborative.
Ensures project objectives
You consider topics like color psychology and how you want users to feel when using the website. Mood boards help bring this all together to ensure that the design will work as planned and achieve the goals you established with the customer from the start of the project.
Makes the procedure more seamless and faster
Including the customer at the beginning of the work, already when design aspects are finalized, enables the project to proceed more quickly. Mood boards assist in avoiding client surprises because they make clients fully conscious of the creative selections before they see the final result.
Serves as an excellent reference tool
You can put mood boards on collaboration apps, which allows everyone participating in the project to quickly return to the URL and look at it for uniformity. You can quickly double-check typography, colors, as well as other aspects. Although it’s easier to be creative when you’re running wild, it’s also necessary to discover strategies to focus inspiration and arrange it into digestible notions. We’ve created a list of some of the best mood board-making tools available online to help you get started on clear, innovative communication.
Canva
Canva is an excellent online mood board builder for producing many creative elements. You can make things easier using Canva drag-and-drop tools for editing and designing purposes. Their vast collection of a wide range of templates will help you choose a unique one. Decorate your mood board by adding images from their picture library, adding text, and highlighting with colors to express more. Canva also gives you access to share your creativity with others. To make a mood board using Canva, begin with the presentation layout or a design area with customized proportions. You may select a format for a customized mood board by choosing the grids option. When the foundation is in position, you can add photographs and text to every section to deliver a unique representation or even edit those photos.
Creately
Creately is a fantastic tool for online brainstorming sessions, using an online whiteboard with built-in ideation tools such as thought maps or post-it note walls. You can simply drag-and-drop and create features that make it simple to visualize, connect, group, and prioritize designs and concepts through Creately. You can also import videos, photos, documents, and more to highlight your imagination or to integrate your ideas to be more creative. Adding texts via the note feature to make clients grasp more of it is another added feature of Creately. By adding custom fields, you can create a data-rich mood board. It also features an infinite canvas, which allows you to store, organize, and administer the creative pool as it expands. This will assist you in generating varying viewpoints of your thoughts using model objects and converting them into Kanban boards, roadmaps, workflows, and other formats.
Adobe Express
The Adobe Express Mood Board generator offers a variety of modification choices to help you design content that genuinely expresses your emotions and feelings. Adobe Express provides easy-to-use functions, themes, icons, logos, personalized fonts, and so on, where you can create your mood board quickly within minutes. It provides you with a wide range of customization options. Begin with a variety of templates and then tweak them to excellence. Text may be resized, moved around the screen, special effects filters used, and border configuration changed so you can invest more time in creating the perfect mood board.
Milanote
Milanote is an alternative worth examining if you seek an easy-to-use solution to arrange your thoughts. It is the perfect tool for collecting inspiration by organizing your vision more perfectly. The program works in any current web browser and provides the same or more room and structure as you may require to ultimately allow your artistic creations to grow. It integrates with Pexels to give instant access to libraries for more images, and you can also add your own. It supports all image formats. It may be configured as a separate suite for you to think about or as a communal workstation for cooperation—the option is yours. You can start with a chosen template or can create one using provided tools. You may register for a free account and have access to Milanote’s inspirational and template collections to assist you in getting started.
VistaCreate
VistaCreate allows you to create an eye-catching mood board quickly. Emphasize good ideas to describe your thoughts and express your points by highlighting worthy ideas. You may also show your originality by getting inspired by the templates in the media library and by creating your own designs using a single eye-catching graphic. Make your mood board a visual story rather than just a collection of pictures by adding personalized fonts of different colors and giving it a name that reflects your main message. With only an inspiration board, you can use VistaCreate’s professionally-made templates to establish your work’s ideal mood and orientation. This allows you to share your thoughts with a larger audience.
Fotor
Fotor’s mood board generator allows you to generate fascinating mood boards. It enables you to express your line of thinking using tons of features, i.e., backgrounds, colors, fonts, and graphics provided in this. Further, you can add high-resolution pictures, stickers, and vectors to add essence to your design. Fotor’s library gives you access to various stickers, flowers, food, music, etc., to please your demands. Fotor’s mood board generator allows you to share your design immediately on social networking networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest. It reduces the time and effort spent publishing and exporting your mood board layout to numerous platforms.
Weje
Weje is an all-in-one collaborative workplace for organizing and sharing ideas, papers, and brainstorming sessions. It features data collection and a visual library with lots of ideas about organizing it systematically. It makes your mood board easy to access, quickly shareable, and handier. Weje compiles your content in one easy-to-manage place. You may share a virtual drawing board more easily to convey your thoughts and materials to life in minutes. This app will also assist you in organizing and sharing project materials and managing tasks in a structured visual manner. Weje has a unique flexible user interface that helps you to think more.
Kapwings
If you’re searching for a free online mood board maker, try Kapwing’s Studio. Collage Maker by Kapwing allows you to organize pictures, color patches, textures, photographs, icons, text, and much more onto an improvised digital canvas. Within Kapwing, creators can combine video clips, trim, overlay text, and images, and upload music too. These videos can be edited directly in browsers from any device. Kapwing includes a variety of modern features which are fast, reliable, and easy to learn and use. It’s simple to customize and design your mood board, whether for your Pinterest board, Instagram story, Twitter banner, or dorm room, all for free and online. Kapwing works on any type of phone or tablet browser, i.e., easy to use in all browsers.
Wondershare EdrawMax
Wondershare EdrawMax is an excellent online tool for creating mood boards. This free mood board creator includes pre-built templates to help you create mood boards that suit your tastes. EdrawMax users upload thousands of free templates that will ease down your efforts and will save you time in creating mood boards. It allows you to make team collaboration better and easier. This also supports to export of files in multiple formats, including graphics, video, and more.
Conclusion
Creating mood boards digitally for your job is not easy, but it should attract clients. Including mood boards in your design process can help to keep everything on track and organized, making your life simpler. Include the client’s demands and requirements in the mix and design a mood board. The internet is a never-ending source of inspiration and ideas for becoming more creative. Make the mood board whatever you like. Be open to fresh ideas and designs, and assist everyone in achieving their vision of the mood board in one location. Finally, always solicit feedback and suggestions for your mood board. Mind maps are effective ways to channel your thoughts and ideas into a blank canvas. Here, you can explore some best mind map makers.
