Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Mood Board Learning & Primary Mood Board for my project

When trying to convey a design idea, moods, feelings and fluffy stuff like that are hard to communicate. So professional designers will often use mood boards: a collection of textures, images and text related to a design theme as a reference point.

Mood boards help others to 'get inside our heads' in order to convey a thematic setting for a design or to explain function in piece of work.

Real world inspirations are all around us. So use the camera on your phone to take pictures of everything you see that inspires you - whether that be a bird in flight, a great use of typography on a sign, or the brickwork on a building. They don't have to be great photos in the traditional sense - it's all about capturing thoughts, impressions, themes and feelings.

When putting together mood boards, think of yourself as a curator rather than a collector, and try to have meaning and threads from one image to the next. It makes for easier interpretation.

Whether it's being electronic or physical, the layout of your mood board needs to give prominence to key theme images, then surround these with smaller supporting images that enhance the theme. 

When someone looks at a large image on your board in their heads they'll have questions about it - which they'll quickly scan the rest of the board to find answers for. If you place smaller supporting images around the larger image they should do this job for you by clarifying the messaging given in the larger one.


Locking an idea or a style down in a mood board can be detrimental, as the client will feel shoehorned into going with a particular style. Keep everything a little loose and don't make everything look too finalised.
If you're using preview images from image libraries don't worry about the watermarking on them - it all adds up to a 'hey look, we can change this - these are ideas' feel to the board.

Don't ignore the power of a few isolated words on a board. They're fantastic show-stoppers and give your viewer pause for thought as they have to mentally read what's in front of them. Big, bold words juxtaposed together work very well at creating drama, tone and meaning for any project.

Finally, don't forget to test out your boards before you send them off. Remember, it's not a game of Pictionary, so if your testing audience have to ask too many times what an image means or why it's there, then it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.

The whole process of creating mood boards should be fun - a refreshing break from the often tedious tasks of the jobbing designer. If you're not having fun then it's a sure sign you're going about things the wrong way...




Here is a mood board that I have primarily developed for my personal project, I plan to execute a book project contain the use of conceptual photography in its content, on purpose to practice my personal creative thinking skills and planning skills. I plan to use photo manipulation in graphic design field to execute the content in the way to combine my photography and graphic design skills. I choose the thin sans sarif fonts in content, cause it gives the clean, simple and clear style of the contents. I have chosen 5 styles of fonts. 

This mood board is a primary decision, I will develop more later on in the process of doing this project.

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