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My Creative Process

What is a Mood Board?

Mood board is a type of visual presentation or collage consisting of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition. It can be helpful in conveying a general idea, feeling or vision for about a particular topic. Sometimes it’s difficult to express your visual ideas to others, a mood board can be an efficient visual communication tool.

Mood boards are basically collages of items such as photographs, sketches, clippings, fabric swatches and color samples. They can be helpful in getting client approval on the visual direction of a project and they can also be helpful as a means of research and inspiration to the designer.

Mood boards are a collage that reflect and explore the following criteria of a project:

  • Color schemes
  • Textures
  • Patterns
  • Typography
  • General feelings/emotions (mood and tone) that should be conveyed
  • Characteristics relating to lifestyle
  • Watch: A Graphic Designer’s reasons to create a Mood Board:

Digital Mood Boards

Digital moodboards allow you to incorporate images you’ve seen on the internet or objects you’ve photographed digitally. Here a few online platforms:

  • Pinterest. This social media platform lets you easily bring together images into themed “boards”. Another advantage is that it’s easy to collaborate with others.
  • Canva.
  • Milanote

Mind Maps – Brainstorming Ideas

A mind map (or brain map) is a diagram used to visually organize information. They are often created around a single concept and drawn as an image in the center of a blank landscape page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those. It is meant to help you begin to visualize the research you collected for ‘the Pitch.’

The main idea, subject or focus is crystallized into a central image. The main themes radiate from the central image as ‘branches.’ The branches comprise a key image or key word drawn or printed on its associated line. Topics of lesser importance are represented as ‘twigs’ of the relevant branches

Watch below to learn about mind maps here: