Creating a Mood Board
When you are first given a design brief or an art project you may not be sure if your ideas are going to work well together, you may even be struggling for inspiration, or you might simply want to experiment with the ideas that the project brings to mind.
Mood boards are a great way to develop ideas and try things out before undertaking a huge amount of work and before investing in any expensive materials. Making mood boards is an accepted technique in the design processes and they are widely used by many designers, artists and students. They aim to capture the atmosphere generated by the brief by means of a range of expressive visual media. They provide a mechanism for designers to respond to perceptions about the brief that they have been given; they also help to highlight any problems as they emerge. As they develop they will often trigger new unexpected ideas to explore.
Designers use mood or concept boards to convey the overall feel of a project, putting together images and objects which inspire, target desires and facilitate creativity and innovation. Mood boards are also very useful at the early stages of a project as a guide tool to show to clients for approval before proceeding further.
Mood boards are assembled by gluing or fixing on to a mounting board, many different types of media: pictures from magazines, photographs, fabrics, objects, etc. These are the more traditional Mood Boards but it is becoming increasingly common for designers to produce digital mood boards as well. Digital mood boards are created in exactly the same way, by collecting media in a digital format and assembling the collection with the help of graphics software, such as Photoshop, Illustrator or Freehand.
What to do:
As soon as you have your brief or project start to gather together a collection of items that spring to mind as being connected to your topic. The collection might include any or all of the following:
- Photographs:
- from magazines
- newspapers
- leaflets
- or photographs that you have taken
- Leaflets:
- collected from shops
- Galleries
- museums
- Typefaces:
- from newspapers
- magazines
- other printed sources
- Drawings and sketches:
- your own, or
- copied from other artists and designers
- Samples:
- fabric
- wallpaper
- thread
- wool
- Colours:
- sample cards from DIY stores
- Natural materials:
- leaves
- flowers
- stems
- seed pods
- shells
- feathers
- stones
Anything that seems to you to have a connection with your brief should be added to your collection including written notes of any partly formed ideas and reminders to hunt down particular objects. Also aim to include essential textures, colours and shapes that hold a message about the look you want. Don’t forget to also include your own work even if it is only in the form of quick sketches, rough drawings and colour schemes. Use anything and everything that springs to mind!
Layout:
Although layouts of mood and sample boards vary greatly depending on the type and size of a project, basic guidelines can be followed to create visually pleasing boards and boards that appear to be clean and uncluttered.
The first step is to decide upon the size of board you are going to work with and then divide it into thirds, both vertically and horizontally; either portrait or landscape. Place the focal point, the most important image or sample that you have, where two of these lines cross. At any of the points labelled A, B, C or D in the diagram below; then carefully arrange your other images or samples around the first one.
Try to create lines of sight leading to the focal point and make sure all images and samples are neatly glued or mounted. The board represents the overall design and you should therefore aim to keep it neat, clean and focussed.
Keep your board in a prominent place where you can keep looking and thinking about it. When it comes to the actual design of your work you will have a much clearer idea of the kinds of textures, colours and themes that will best match your brief.