Article discusses mood boards in context of web design - but the principles seem entirely translatable.
Begin notes from Article
- Mood boards are useful for mocking up design ideas for presentation to a client.
- Removes the inherent ambiguity of written/spoken words by providing solid visual examples of designers intention.
- a compilation of inspirational elements
- photography style, colour palettes, typography, patterns, overall look and feel of the site.
- Soft or hard, grungy or clean, dark or light.
- Casual and rapid visual prototyping
- Any changes that the client needs or if they want more options to choose from - can easily and quickly be created or revised.
Style of board to use - loose collage or refined template?
- Loose collage easiest to make and less formal but may be confusing for clients who don't interact with designers often. Less detail oriented.
- Refined template better for clients who don't work often with designers or are very detail focused.
Author tends to create 3 wildly different mood boards for each project, 1-3 hours on each. Wide range of styles important for getting most out of process.
Discussion with client - explain what you want out of the meeting and open for all feedback. Let them know the inspiration behind each board - the list of adjectives is useful. Clients tend to know real fast which board feels right to them.
Benefits of using Mood Boards:
- Defining a visual guide early on means you waste less time doing more intensive work that will eventually be scrapped - save a lot of time down the line by doing this work at the start.
- Earlier involvement of clients make them feel more involved, help them feel listened to.
- Clients get a deeper sense of why you made your choices and trust you more to make these choices.
- Freedom to experiment more outside of limitations like layout and technical realities.
- Reduced no. of revision cycles
Examples from the article:
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| Loose collage mood board, copyright webdesignerdepot.com |
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| Refined template mood board, copyright webdesignerdepot.com |
End notes from article.
The most relevant information where a list of sites that could be useful in creating mood boards.
Copied directly from the site:
"At Digital Surgeons, we use mood boards to establish an overarching visual language on a brand, product or site level. And we don't just stop at visuals on our mood boards either: we cover everything from voice and tone, ad-like objects, interactions and interface patterns."
Design systems - provides an overview of what mood boards are and how creating one will help you. styletil.es - a great site by Samantha Warren, which helps explain the benefit of using style tiles in your next design. Pinterest - not just for cupcake recipes and wedding planning anymore. Pinterest is an endless source of visual inspiration on whatever category you seek. Dribbble - surf the latest and greatest from designers all over the world for your inspiration cravings. Behance - An online portfolio site from all imaginable creative fields. Their recent acquisition from Adobe will hopefully keep them flush with cash and motivation to keep growing (and hopefully not lose their soul in the process). PatternTap - Pattern Tap is your one-stop shop for User Interface inspiration. Image Spark - a great site for discovering and curating and discovering mood boards. Unfortunately, it seems to be on the chopping block from its creators, so enjoy the images while you still can. mural.ly - a new site that aims to be the collaborative tool for designers to work together on a look. Musespeak - Another great collaborative tool for teams to create mood boards together. Moodshare - A great platform for search, creating and sharing mood boards.
Checked out a couple. Styletil.es was interesting. Written specifically for web-design, it was not all relevant. But it had a list of design terms that are useful to keep in mind and can drive research over the next couple of weeks:
Elements of design
- Line
- Color
- Shape
- Form
- Pattern
- Space
- Texture
Principles of design
- Unity
- Harmony
- Balance
- Rhythm
- Emphasis
Written by Paul Wyatt
Article seems to be more about presentation for a client than the collection and generation of ideas.
- Look at non-digital sources of inspiration as well. Both publications and self-taken photos. Snapshots.
- Try to have 'meaning and threads from one image to the next' rather than just a collection of images. Curate threads and synergies. A compositional thing?
- Offline vs Online - "An offline mood board will generally be looser in style and require the extra kick and emotive spark that comes from it being presented to a client. An online mood board should be tighter and will generally need to work harder to convey a theme or style."
Why? Online won't have you there to help explain the theme or style, I assume. Can provide emotive support via audio too, whereas an Offline board must provide emotion through imagery and your performance alone? - Layout give prominence to key theme images and have smaller supporting and explanatory images around these. Viewer will look around the board for images to explain any questions they have about the key images.
- The tactile nature of cut-out images glued onto boards enhances the emotiveness of what’s being explained.
- Can practice mood board skills by creating a 3x3 grid of images to explain what you are like, then test it out on colleagues.
- You can use text tastefully
- Have an obvious theme. Ensure it's relatable to the client.
- If it ties in with something you experienced then add that in. Client emotive connection.
- Better to over explain than under explain.
Was unsure about using a mood board as an idea generation/personal style definition tool. Found this blog that states that "Moodboards are great for generating ideas and sticking to an aesthetic feel that may not already exist in one designed artifact alone."
To do: revisit the red text above in class and also ask lecturers if moodboards would be good to use in my situation for defining a design language.
My own process:
I'm trying out Google's image viewing and organisation software Picasa at the moment. It looks like it will be useful for organising my collected reference image library, given that I can assign tags to images or groups of images based on their content. Later on I can type in a search for one or more tags and find all the images that pertain to my search.
I can create an album from as many or as few images as I want and then create a collage from that album, effectively creating a mood board.
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