10 Moodboarding Tips to Enhance Your Project
Moodboarding is a must-have in your toolkit for creative projects. All my client work includes ongoing collaborative moodboarding. It’s my go-to method for organizing my ideas, getting inspired, and communicating with clients using visual input. I’m an visual thinker, and without this, I can’t organize my thoughts or express myself fully. I use it for everything from branding projects to illustrations to planning my classes. It’s an critical part of my creative process. I wouldn’t be able to do my work without it!
A client moodboard from last year: lots of reds and earthy, natural colors, elegant type, Indian motifs and traditional painting. Warm, sophisticated, and historically-rooted.
Even if you’re not a super visual person or someone who works with images a lot, moodboarding is an incredible tool for any situation that requires creative and visual thinking. Moodboards help you collect ideas and reference material, and provide a way to translate abstract ideas into concrete visual examples. Leaning into a feeling and sensory-based process provides context for your ideas. What’s hard to describe in words can often be better conveyed through images.
But not all mooodboards are created equal. When using this process as a tool for work, there are some tricks to creating an effective moodboard, a balance of practicality and creativity. User-generated content based platforms like Instagram and Pinterest make moodboarding easy and streamlined, much more so than analog methods that involve collaging and collecting lots of physical ephemera and photos (though I encourage that too!). You can pull basically anything from the internet and hold into it for inspo (it’s kind of bananas when you think about it). While this has immense benefits, it also means you have to be thoughtful and strategic about how you do it and what you include. It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole and end up with an endless scroll of content soup instead of a helpful resource for inspiration that you can actually use.
Here are my tips for creating the best possible moodboard for your projects. These can help you narrow your focus to keep content relevant, get expansive, and get outside your head.
1. Define your purpose.
Creating moodboards for a project is different than doing it for fun. If you’re a person who already moodboards, chances are you do so for personal enjoyment, at least in part. When doing it for fun, let it rip. Go wild. But when you’re moodboarding for a project, be more selective. It can fall off the rails fast unless you clearly define your needs. A clear sense of purpose creates a little structure that will keep the content relevant and interconnected. Know what the goals of the board are before you start. Are you trying to generate ideas for something specific you want to make? Do you need to collect reference material to show someone else? Are you trying to consolidate examples of what other people have done in the past? Simply collecting stuff you like doesn’t establish consistency or direction. Know what you’re trying to achieve so that you choose content that serves the larger goal.
2. Define your scope.
In addition to keeping the content relevant, gear the quantity of content to the scope of your needs. Quantity is a bell curve: too little, and it will lack in cohesion and feel incomplete. Too much, and you’ll be overwhelmed. What defines “too much” and “too little” depends on the project. For a big project, like branding for your business, having 10 images isn’t enough visual data. Larger, multifaceted projects require enough content that you can start to see patterns and core themes, and touch on all the different arms of the project. For a small project that doesn’t have a lot of moving parts, like redecorating your half-bath, 200 images is probably overkill. Having a boatload of content can be distracting instead of helpful.
3. Don’t get stuck in the literal.
Moodboarding is all about making connections, and connections happen when you’re open to the unexpected. It’s like untying a knot: if you pull on it, the knot tightens, so you have to loosen your grip to unravel it. With mood boarding, loosen your grip on the literal a little and don’t be afraid to include content that might seem out of place at first glance. Let the inspiration unravel. Look for things that create a mood (hence the term “moodboard”) and evoke the senses: color, light, texture, words, space, taste, form, aroma, time. For example, a good brand mood board would definitely have some cool logos and well designed websites, but it would also include images of things like decor that gives off a specific ambiance, fashion photography that reflects to a target audience, music, sculptures, videos, food, doodles… You can get weird with it, as long as there is an identifiable connection to your purpose.
4. Find your “whys”.
Even for more out-there selections, you should be able to describe what the connection is to your purpose. Why and how dose an image relate to your project? What information does it give you? What do you like about it? Write it down or make a mental note (if you’re using Pinterest, there is an option to add notes to each pin). You might not know right away, so go back through and revisit the board throughout your process. This is especially important for moodboards that you’re sharing with others. If a collaborator asks, “What does this photo of ceramic tile have to do with the label we’re designing?”, you should be able to explain to them why you chose it. This gives you clarity and helps you communicate your ideas effectively.
5. Find your flow.
The best part about moodboarding, in my opinion, is letting go of your thinking mind and allowing your intuition take the lead. Doing this opens you up to being less literal and more creative. After a while, you get into a groove and totally lose yourself in the task. By the end of the process, you’ll have what feels like a storybook leading you through your own imagination, full of connections you didn’t even know were there. These connections are like guideposts that show you where all the little sparks of inspiration were leading you. Surrendering to the process is a lot more fun, anyway.
6. Break it up.
When you do find your groove in the process, it’s tempting to stay at it for hours and do all the collecting at once. There have been many times when I started a board, got really into it, and came back to reality two hours later wondering where the time went. This can be enjoyable, but it tends to not yield the most helpful results. You’re likely to end up with a meandering, disorganized board with a lot of content but not much consistency, or on the flip side, redundancy. Instead of dumping it all in at once, take space between sessions. Limit yourself to 30 minutes to an hour at a time, and return for multiple rounds. Breaking it up into chunks gives you time to integrate what you’ve seen, and encourages you to revisit what you’ve already collected.
7. Notice Patterns
This is arguably the most important tip in this list. Moodboarding is, in essence, a form of pattern-seeking. The human brain has evolved to look for patterns and repetition as a way of acquiring information, and you can use this to your creative advantage. Once you’ve got a decent collection of images, look through what you have, and ask yourself what patterns are emerging. What colors show up again and again? What similarities do you see between images of people or spaces? Do you notice any symbols or visual metaphors coming up? Are there descriptive words that come to mind as you review? Sometimes these patterns are obvious, like, “Wow, this board has a lot of images of plants!” Some will be more subtle: “After a second look, I started noticing a lot of curvy shapes and lines.” Patterns point to consistency. They’re a sign to you that you’re narrowing in on an overarching idea or theme.
8. Use multiple sources.
Online moodboarding tools sometimes lead you to additional content based on what you’ve already collected. While this is a great feature, it comes with some limitations. First of all, algorithms tend to steer you towards more of the same, which can get you stuck in categories of content that can make your board too repetitive. Variety is key. Second, each platform will tend to cater to specific target audiences and trends, which can box you in. Even if the demographics and trends suit your project, having several resources to pull from keeps your inspiration fresh and diverse so you can express your uniqueness. There’s no shortage of resources! Look outside of the platforms. Check out sites like Flickr for photos, museum and artist websites, Behance for design and illustration, blogs, online magazines, Unsplash for stock imagery, historical archives, and places where you’ll find content specific to your industry or niche. Generate your own content, too! Include photos from your phone, drawings from your sketchbook, whatever. This has the added benefit of diversifying what’s out there. Maybe someone else will get inspiration from what you’ve found out in the world.
9. Organize!
Creative process and organization sometimes are at odds with each other (as the reigning queen of Chaotic Artist Brain, I know what I’m talking about). With moodboarding, a touch of organizing goes a long way, especially for big projects. Putting your content in an order that makes sense or creating sub-categories makes your board feel more purposeful and clear. How you choose to organize your content is up to you, but having some semblance of structure behind it can be the difference between trying to find a needle in a haystack and being able to pull up what you need right off the bat. Since you’ll already be going back and looking for patterns, you can do the same with categories, continuity, and narratives that appear in the process. Pinterest has a great feature for nesting sections within your boards, so take advantage of this if you’re using it as your main tool. If you’re creating a more collage-style board, you might try having separate pages for different content. To use the half-bath example from earlier, you might separate “wall ideas” and “bathroom organizing” into two different sub-boards or pages so that when you are tackling one aspect of the project, your ideas are bunched together intentionally.
10. Edit!
Even if you have clearly defined purpose and scope, it’s still worth doing some editing like you would with a piece of writiing. Early in the process, things tend to be a little more broad, and become more focused and precise as you add. As you hone in on clearer direction, some of the content won’t be relevant to the overall theme or style. Let yourself be a little looser at the beginning, and then go back and refine. Don’t be afraid to take stuff out. If you’re attached to an image but it’s not quite fitting or you can’t define your “why”, move it to another board. You can always come back to it as inspiration for a future project.
Now that you’ve got some guidelines under your belt, check out this post from Creative Bloq that highlight a few excellent moodboarding tools for your next project.