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Writer's pictureAshley Polan

Tips for Creating Awesome Mood Boards

It's that time of the year where we're all setting goals and planning for the year ahead. A mood board is an important element to goal-setting and bringing your vision to life so we decided to put together a few tips to help you create your most awesome mood board yet! When putting together a content strategy, mood boards are key to translating your vision and helping you through each step of the creative process so you don't lose sight of the end-goal. There's nothing more frustrating to a creator than hearing "I need a video" or "I need a cake" with no other descriptive or visual direction. Providing collaborators with a clear vision beforehand will give them the tools they need to better execute your vision or your client's vision.



What is a Mood Board


Mood boards are used to capture and collect ideas for an upcoming campaign, photo or video shoot, overall social media content strategy, etc. Oftentimes these boards include everything that catches the creator's eye and is relevant to the project, from color palettes and editing styles to location and product placement. These visuals are then displayed in the form of one big collage to be shared with other collaborators for this project.



What to Include on a Mood Board


There really is no right or wrong answers as to what should or shouldn't be including in a mood board. Ultimately you want to be able to give collaborators something to reference to help them better understand your overall vision. When you begin searching for images and quotes online, consider these things when selecting images to include on your mood board:

  • Who are my collaborators and how will this help them execute my vision

  • What emotion(s) do I want to evoke from the audience

  • What action (if any) do I want my audience to take

  • Photo/video editing style

  • Graphic design style

  • Color palette

  • Fonts and typography

  • Product placement

  • Model(s) poses and positions

  • Wardrobe

  • Props

  • Locations



Presenting Your Mood Board


There really is no right or wrong way to create the collage, you may choose to display yours the old fashioned way by taping or gluing photos to a poster board with sticky notes or a digital version using Powerpoint or Canva. It's important to also note why you've included certain images because it may be translated differently depending on whom is looking at the board. For example, you may add a photo of a cake you'd like to be made for the shoot but the editing style of the photo may not be what you're looking for. Include a small notation so your photographer is not confused by this.

Summary


Mood boards are key in bringing your vision or your client's vision to life. Oftentimes there are many collaborators on a project, a mood board will help each creator understand the overall vision of the project so they can better execute their portion. If you haven't created a mood board for a project yet, give it a go and let us know how it went!

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