How To Create A Mood Board

Written by: Sachin Parmar

Mood boards are a vital part of the design process, but are you taking full advantage of this powerful document’s ability to strengthen your client relationship? If not, read on to find out more.

Sachin Parmar, Co-founder and Creative Director from evokeu, London’s leading boutique digital marketing and branding agency, shares his years of design experience and how he’s taught his team to use mood boards to their full potential.

As creatives, we might have a clear vision in mind for a design, but conveying it to our clients can be tricky. A mood board is a visual representation of your thoughts and can contain everything from images that have inspired the design, to illustrations, sketches and keywords. Creating a mood board is an important step in the design process, as it ensures that your concept aligns with your client’s. Design is subjective and although you may think a design idea is strong, you need to remember that your client is the paying customer, therefore their opinion should be your priority and focus.

To make sure both you and your client are getting the most from the mood board, it’s worth including the following aspects.

Show your range

A mood board is a prime opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of your abilities. Perhaps there’s a specific style that you’re especially good at or you’d like to show that the design could be finished in a variety of different ways. A mood board doesn’t need to be neat, it can be a mishmash of design, as long as it clearly illustrates to your client the direction of your design ideas, from colour palette and theme to texture. Get crafty and create your mood board from an A1 piece of white card. On this blank canvas, you can then stick and paste everything that has influenced your design decisions. If it’s not easy to share your masterpiece, you could always take a photo and send this to your client, as long as it’s high resolution enough so that they can zoom in and look closer at certain areas.

Be bold and different

A mood board isn’t a place where you should hold back or repress your creativity. Be daring, confident and expressive with what you include on your mood board. Don’t forget that your client has hired you for your design prowess, so now is the time to blow them away with your bold ideas. Include colour and various formats to help explain to your client all the concepts you’ve dreamed up for their project. Look at the mood board as your brainstorming session, where you’re getting everything out of your head and onto a page. Once you’ve revealed your mood board to your client, it should spark a conversation and ideas will be refined, allowing you to move to the next stage of the design process safe in the knowledge that your client is happy with the path that you’re taking.

Capture their attention

A mood board is part of the initial stages of design and if you’re working with a new client, this might be the first example of your work that they’ve seen since they hired you. Although a mood board isn’t a formal piece of work, it still needs to impress your client. Use this as a chance to solidify your client’s decision of choosing you to complete their project. Spend time putting together your mood board, as it’ll shape the next stages of design as well as the relationship you have with your client. However, don’t forget the deadline you have to work towards and that the majority of your efforts should be spent on creating the finished article for your client. Keep a good balance between selling the quality of your skills and using your mood board as a stepping stone to progressing your project.

Evokeu often uses mood boards when building a bank of ideas for a project, some of which they share with clients and others that are used for just the internal team’s purpose. Mood boards are an essential part of designing and can strengthen the final product. If you need design support for your project, then speak to the team at evokeu, who can take care of web, brand or marketing design and implementation whatever your business or sector.

If you’d like to find out more about Sachin and evokeu, please visit here. You can also follow Sachin on LinkedIn, where he frequently posts business advice and inspiring content.

About the author:

Sachin Parmar is the Co-founder and Creative Director of boutique digital marketing and branding agency, evokeu. With decades of design experience, Sachin has a keen eye for detail and a drive to create consistently superior results. Sachin and his expert team work with big and small brands across many sectors to help clients capture customer attention and create growth. Evokeu also has a vertical brand called Graphic Kitchen, which specialises in the hospitality sector.