Mood boards (sometimes called inspiration boards) are used in a variety of disciplines. The term is used frequently when referring to the creative process in Interior and Fashion Design. In essence they are a compilation of inspirational elements used by designers to flesh out ideas at the beginning of a design project.

A mood board is extremely useful for establishing the aesthetic feel of a web site. It usually fits into the process somewhere after wireframes and before design mockups. But it appears that many of you still don’t know what kind of tone you want to set. It’s great if we can plan our “stage” before we move on.

Things that can be explored in the mood board include photography style, color palettes, typography, patterns, and the overall look and feel of the site. Soft or hard? Grungy or clean? Dark or light? A rough collage of colors, textures and pictures is all it takes to evoke a specific style or feeling.

Don’t just make it a sloppy collage – it should contain some kind of logic and structure. Give us  sense in terms of how you will be grouping objects or sub-concepts. Again, don’t make this just a sloppy collage. Put some gut into it.

A mood board is intentionally casual; it lets the designer start with broad strokes and get feedback before too much time is invested in the wrong direction. Think of it as rapid visual prototyping. Look at the examples below. These are fairly typical. For web design, your mood boards should achieve the following:

• General color family (3 – 4)
• Typographical choices (serif vs. sans-serif)
• Type of imagery (i.e. cartoons vs. macro snapshots of insects)
• Layout (minimal vs dense)

Mood boards can be built with anything. You can make them digitally but I’m always more impressed with the good old collage of found imagery and a glue stick. Bring these in on Monday. If you forget, then you get zero credit.

What I’m listening to at work right now:

Halycon + On + On by reals deep house2

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