BY JERED LOPEZ
As a leader in 1910 PR, I had the opportunity to share some of my knowledge with the team by creating a twenty-minute training. For my training, I took the firm on a journey into constructing a mood board, also known as an inspiration board.
A mood board is the creative process of brainstorming, whether it’s a digital or physical collage, mood boards are used by graphic designers, social media managers, and brand managers. They are essential for juicing up the creative flow and can include anything—color palettes, imagery, fonts, words, example logos—pretty much anything that will help you with an idea.
Unsure where to start? Let me paint you a picture with a hypothetical situation. Let’s say your offered an opportunity to create a poster for a music festival and the theme is pastel summer.
I always began my mood boards by finding two color palettes that best represent the theme. In this case, search for a color palette that best fits the theme of pastel summer.
The quickest way I found to generate a color palette is to use Coolors.
Coolors is a web page that generates a package of 5 color combinations. The nice thing about Coolors is that you can save, download, and share your chosen color palette. Once you’ve found a color palette that feels appropriate for the project, you can begin searching for images. These images should be related to pastel summer and capture the overall mood of the festival (see what I did there?!).
You should have fun picking out what images to include in your mood board because they are essential in fine-tuning your inspiration.
The images can be of anything—fruits, buildings, drinks, clothing, previous festival posters, and more. My favorite websites that offer free, licensed images are Unslpash and Pixabay. It's important to honor a creator's licensing rights, and these sources are great libraries to choose from. They have high-quality images that you can use for any project.
After your color palette and images are selected, you can begin creating your physical or digital collage. I prefer to use Illustrator for all my design work, but if you're wanting an application that’s user-friendly and time-efficient, I suggest using Canva. Canva is another free option that has the potential to teach a lot about design for beginners.
Now that you know how to create a mood board, you’ll never have to spend forever asking yourself, “What am I going to do for this project?” because you’ll already know what to do!
The creative brainstorming of mood boards can not only help you, but it can also help a client picture your ideas. Enjoy the free goodies and have fun creating!