Building a brand isn’t without its challenges and difficulties. You need a significant amount of data about your target market, industry, potential competitors, and more.
Beyond that, you also need to put a lot of thought into forming your brand identity. You need to figure out how to best visualize your brand and communicate it to your audience. This is where a brand mood board would come in handy.
What Is a Mood Board?
A mood board is a physical or digital collage. It is a collection of images, text, and other related content that may serve as inspiration or a guide in forming your brand identity and design.
Other ideas you can include in a mood board are visual metaphors, keywords, fonts, textures, colors, and more. These allow you to give visual representation to your thoughts and ideas, as well as organize them better.
Mood boards have been around for years, though they have become more popular recently thanks in part to Pinterest. Mood boards are more than a Pinterest obsession, though — they are also highly useful tools for building and conveying your brand identity.
Why and When Would You Need One?
A mood board serves as a valuable tool for providing inspiration and guidance when building your brand identity. It also helps ensure that your brand ideas, thoughts, and vision are conveyed clearly right away. It can help set up the visual direction and allow for early fine-tuning of your team’s ideas.
Mood boards are also useful for other types of design projects. Designers in various fields often use mood boards to communicate their ideas visually and conveniently to clients. Mood boards serve as a great collaboration tool between you and your clients or you and your design team.
Mood Board Examples
Looking at mood board examples is one of the easiest and best ways to learn how to make a mood board. Here are five great mood board examples you can check out:
- Illustrations Mood Board
- Interior Design Mood Board
- Mobile App Design Mood Board
- Terracotta Brand Mood Board
- Physical or Analog Brand Mood
Where To Make Mood Boards
There are a wealth of online and offline tools you can use to create a mood board. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, so picking the right tool would depend on you and your team’s collaboration and approach.
Pinterest is one of the most popular online mood board creation tools. The service allows you to pull images from websites and other pinboards or collections that users have curated. You can also create group boards to make collaboration easier.
Canva
Canva is an online tool that has a vast range of ready-made designs. This is a great place to start if you want a mood board template. Canva also has thousands of color swatches, stock photos, and built-in fonts. You have the choice to use the free version or sign up for a premium account.
Graphic Design Software
Adobe Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC are two of the industry standards in graphic design and vector illustration, respectively. However, Adobe Spark, which features an extensive library of stock photos and design elements, may be more ideal to use. Recently, Affinity Designer has also been gaining a following.
These programs allow you to create your own mood boards. They give you more freedom over your color choices, fonts, and images. However, creating collaborative mood boards isn’t possible with most design software.
Analog
Offline or analog mood boards require a little more effort but can convey just as much information and provide inspiration. Cutting out photos from magazines may be more tiring but analog mood boards provide the benefit of including texture and 3D elements, like fabrics, actual packaging, and more.
Conclusion
People are naturally visual creatures. Our brains process images much faster than any text explanation. Instead of writing a 1,000-word essay to explain your brand identity, you can succinctly do it in just one brand mood board.
