Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakens.
—Carl Jung
Now that you know what makes your brand different, it’s time to find out what your brand could look like. The perfect tool for this endeavor is the humble moodboard.
A moodboard is simply a collection of found images compiled in a cohesive manner to communicate a design concept.
The limit of the moodboard is that it can only show what has already been done. Alas, I haven’t found a way to borrow visual references from the future yet. The important thing to understand here is that a moodboard is not a collection of references to copy from, but a springboard for your creative concept. Copying is not only unethical, but often illegal. It goes without saying that being another brand’s lookalike or spending your days in court for copyright infringement won’t help you in creating a distinctive brand identity that’s true to its personality and values.
So what’s a moodboard for?
The simple answer is that without one, we’re stuck in a limbo of personal opinions, fear of missing out, and shiny object syndrome multiplied for every person on your core team. We use moodboards to visualize possible creative directions and discuss them with the team to make sure everyone is on the same page and that our brand can, in fact, be visually represented in its beautiful complexity with the creative direction we’ll be finally choosing.
Also, the moodboard we’re about to create will be the only anchor for our visual design until our own brand’s design language has developed. A precious reference and benchmark for the upcoming design work.
Photo by Paulina Milde-Jachowska on Unsplash
Who should create the moodboards?
Creating moodboards is time-consuming and not necessarily enjoyable for people who haven’t developed some level of creative confidence. That’s why it’s better entrusted to a single person, a designer ideally. This is a great little project to test the relationship with a new designer, especially if you’re already planning to hire one later down the road.
However, if a brave and generous creative soul on your team (maybe it’s you?) raised their hand for this, I’m about to share recommendations on how to go about it, but first, make sure the person has the trust and support of the whole team. Let’s go.
Daydream
As to where to find these images, magazines, books, and the internet are your friends. I’ve made a list of useful tools for you at bnhm.com/But before we start browsing, scrolling, clicking, and end up shoehorning our vision into whatever visual inspiration we stumble upon first or cloning one of our competitors, stop. Read the list of your brand attributes and values, and review your customer personas again. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and reflect on the words for a few moments. What do you see?
- What things, shapes, colors, textures, people, or places come to mind? Make a list.
- How does prioritizing some attributes over others change the way you imagine your brand?
- How does your vision compare with your competitors?
It’s a good idea now to create a few slides to summarize the visual identities of your main competitors. Add their brand attributes to the slides, you should be able to extrapolate the correct language from their website, otherwise use your intuition. Use the slides later as an intro to the moodboard presentation so the team has a quick point of reference to evaluate how the creative direction in your moodboards compares.
- Review your customer persona. What do your ideal customers like? What vibes or aesthetics are they attracted to? What do they wear? Where do they hang out? What would feel familiar to them? What would surprise them? What other brands do they love, and what do those look like?
- And another question I like to ask when visualizing possible creative directions, which I learned from my friend and mentor James Victore, is: what’s the wrongest answer?
- Use the next section of this book to think about your concept from different angles and get inspired by the brand identities of businesses like yours.
Return to this exercise multiple times over the course of a few days. Let the vision simmer for a little while. Take notes, draw mind maps, imagine, reminisce. If things feel messy and unpredictable, you’re doing it right. It’s creativity, baby!
I wish somebody had taught me this earlier, it would have saved me endless days (and nights) of scrolling, and a couple of nervous breakdowns: only start looking for visual references when you have a pretty good idea of what it is that you’re looking for.
Collect
Whenever you feel ready, it’s time to begin collecting inspiration. You want to lose yourself in your research, but you also want to make sure you come out on the other side with something to show for it. I find it helpful to make a list of real-world applications that are relevant to the brand I’m working on. For example, if you’re launching a new dating app, you might want to collect inspiration for your user interface. If you’re opening a club, you might want to find inspiration for interiors.
Here’s what to look for when hunting for inspiration:
People
Find portraits or action shots of people that might exemplify your customer personas. Notice their expression, what they’re wearing, and the mood of the photo.
Environments, materials, and things
Collect images of objects, places, patterns, and textures that evoke your brand attributes. A landscape, a building, an interior, where do you and your audience really feel at home? When you’re in your element, what’s the element?
Symbols
Is there any symbolism, dress code, or visual language associated with your industry or brand attributes and values that’s worth following or breaking?
Color & typography
Though it might be useful. You don’t need to look for existing color palettes. In fact, I challenge you not to do that. Your brand typeface and color palette can be extrapolated from other images about people, places, and things. Try to let color and Type be an emergent quality of your final moodboard rather than a prescription.
Collect every image that catches your eye, you will sort through the inspiration and select the best ones later. I find that my understanding of the concept gets sharper as I collect inspiration, until I know exactly what I’m looking for by the end of it. Embrace ambiguity for now and reach for quantity. And avoid collecting multiple references from the same source, author, or brand. Remember, we don’t copycat; our brand deserves better.
Cluster
Review the images you’ve collected and cluster the images that work best together in terms of defining a specific aesthetic. Use your brand attributes to guide you.
You might come up with a few different clusters, each matching one or a few of your brand attributes and values, particularly over the others, and that’s great. It means you’ve found some different ways to visually interpret your brand.
Include in your clusters at least one image from each category we discussed (People, places, materials, things, symbols, colors, typography) to make sure you’re covering the fundamental building blocks of your brand identity. If you feel that an additional image might be useful to complete any of your clusters, go find it. However, note that you can create an effective moodboard with only a handful of well-chosen images. So take this opportunity to distill the vision for each of your clusters to its true essence. Less is more. We’re trying to communicate a vision, not create a template. Your moodboard should inspire, not prescribe.
Lay out
The medium, shape, or size of your moodboard is really not important as long as it illustrates your creative concept clearly. Too little detail will have you chasing your tail, but too much will kill creativity. The goal of the moodboard is synthesis, and though there’s no specific recipe for it that works for every instance, there are ways in which you can challenge yourself to strip off everything that’s unnecessary.
If you’re experienced or brave (or reckless) enough, you can jump directly into creating your own free-form moodboard. Otherwise, I’ve included a few layout ideas for each image cluster. Pick nine main images and arrange them on a 3×3 square grid to create a simple mood board.
The medium, shape, or size of your moodboard is really not important as long as it illustrates your creative concept clearly. Too little detail will have you chasing your tail, but too much detail will kill creativity. The goal of the moodboard is synthesis, and though there’s no specific recipe for it that works for every instance, there are ways in which you can challenge yourself to strip off everything that’s unnecessary.
If you’re feeling confident (or maybe a bit reckless) enough, you can jump directly into creating your own free-form moodboard. Otherwise, remember that constraints are your friend in creativity. Challenge yourself to arrange your images on a simple 3×3 square grid, and prune your image collection to leave only the nine most meaningful images. Repeat for each of your image clusters, and you’ll have created a set of effective, easy-to-read moodboards ready to be shown to the rest of the team for their feedback.
Discuss
I intentionally called this step discuss rather than present. If you’ve been following the process I’ve outlined so far. Looking at the mood boards you’ve created with the rest of the team is just another conversation in the series of conversations we’ve been having so far.
There’s no need to be ceremonious about it; in fact, it will help everyone not to make this event and to avoid building up too many expectations. The goal of the meeting is to get feedback on the moodboards, and there will likely be some refining to do before we can call it a win.
However, you don’t want to just send the moodboards in an email. It is important that the core team is in the room (virtual or physical) to give you the opportunity to frame the conversation correctly and get everyone’s support in discerning strategic feedback from feedback based on anyone’s personal taste or opinion.
Here’s how to run the moodboard review meeting:
- Ask the team for permission to lead the conversation and to hold on to their thoughts and feedback until you’re done presenting the moodboards.
- Take the first few minutes to go through the insights of the previous exercises. Briefly cover your customer personas, brand attributes and values, and competitors.
You’ve researched how your competitors are presenting themselves visually earlier. It’s a good idea to now create a few slides that summarize the visual identities of your main competitors so the team has a quick point of reference to evaluate how the creative direction in your moodboards compares.
- Explain that nothing at this stage is set in stone, and share what we just agreed upon about mood boards: they’re just tools to facilitate this conversation around creative direction and are meant to inspire, not prescribe. Add that you’ll be happy to refine the best moodboard according to the feedback you’ll collect today.
- One by one, present each moodboard. Talk about mood, color, typography, and other relevant aspects of your specific case. Each image is in its respective moodboard for a reason. Explain how everything ties into the insights you’ve just reviewed. Talk about the brand attributes and values that guided your curation the most. Explain how the directions you’re presenting are different from your competitors. This should not take more than a few minutes.
- Now it’s time to hear the teams’ feedback. Ending your presentation with “so, what do you think?” is asking for trouble. You don’t want to start a tug of war between differing personal opinions about the color purple. Instead, ask if the moodboard matches the vision you’ve been trying to define and if it has the potential to stand out among the competition. Ask everyone to put themselves into the shoes of your audience. Would they recognize themselves? Would this speak to them? Would they be attracted?
- Address all questions on the meeting and resolve conflicts on the spot. The goal is to get the team to select one winning mooboard, though you might end up with a close contender, which is fine. Gently dig into feedback that’s too prescriptive to discover the real insight behind it. Sometimes, the insight is that Andrea really hates purple. If Andrea is the CEO, that’s a pretty useful insight! However, try to keep the conversation on the strategic side. I could write a whole other book about it, so the best I can do for now is wish you good luck.
Maybe you knocked this out of the park or had some beginner’s luck (either way, it’s a win), but this is unlikely, even for seasoned designers to get 100% right on the first round. Remember that the goal is facilitating a conversation, not getting an A. This means it is likely you’ll need to go through a couple more steps before you can put a bow on it. Here we go.
- Make sure you understand what the team thinks works well and what doesn’t. Summarize the feedback in a few actionable insights and repeat it back to them to make sure you’ve been listening, are interpreting correctly, and aren’t forgetting anything important.
- Promise you’ll update the preferred moodboard according to the feedback you’ve received. Agree on a time for the team to review the updated moodboard and adjourn the meeting.
Refine & review
Remember that the purpose of the moodboard is to inspire, not prescribe. You will be fine-tuning your designs in every detail as you work on your brand and marketing collaterals. For now, we’re just setting a visual mood. For this reason, one round of review should be enough at this point. Work into the moodboard the missing detail or replace and modify the images you’ve collected according to the feedback you’ve received. Show the results to the team one last time so that you can all give each other a pat on the back, then move on. We have a brand identity to build.