I love mood boards! They are such a great way to gather inspiration for business branding, client work, photoshoots, fun DIY projects or even a room makeover! Today I’m going to walk you through the process of creating your own mood board, because we can’t all work with designers, but we can still learn how to create gorgeous, easy visuals!
In your business, your mood board sets the tone for your branding. It’s the best tool to help you create your unique signature style for your business. It will help keep you aligned, so you don’t wing your visuals and change out your brand elements (colors, fonts, images etc) and as a result it will be easier and faster to create visuals that look more professional and consistent on and off-line.
Helpful benefits of mood boards:
Instantly boosts your credibility as you look more coherent throughout your material
Helps us to get clear on who we’re trying to attract through our visuals
Shows your tribe that you take branding and graphics seriously because you invested the time to create a look a feel for your business
Helps to create your visual recipe as you streamline your graphics
HOW TO CREATE A MOOD BOARD USING CANVA
There are some great resources and tools available online for free for designers, or designer newbies and one of those is Canva! Let’s start by heading to their website and creating a free account.
Step 1: Know your mission statement, core values and brand words
Being clear on these will help you make the right decisions and choose your brand elements accordingly
Mission statement
Core Values
Brand words (3-5)
Here is a great outline on how to write your core values: https://ashlynwrites.com/write-your-core-values/
Step 2: Get your inspiration material ready
It’s essential that you gather all of your inspiration somewhere. Maybe you’ve saved some photos and screenshots on your desktop folder, or you’ve created a tried-and-true Pinterest board. I personally love Pinterest for its ability to curate your feed and suggest similar photos based on what you’re saving to your board! You’ll want to collect images that respresent the feel of your business, things that your ideal customer likes or things that represent the solution to your customers problems.
Here are some helpful questions to ask yourself through this process:
What do I do?
How do I want my brand to feel?
What adjectives would I use to describe my brand?
How would I describe my brand to a close friend?
As you continue to collect inspo you’ll notice a theme will start to develop that will set the tone for your project. What similarities do you notice? What colors are you picking up on? If you feel like you have too many images try to go through them and delete ones that don’t fit the flow you’ve created.
The hard part – Pull your top 5-10 favorite images. Try to include images the encompass a wide range of topics (colors, emotions, design, font etc)
Step 3: Create a mood board template in Canva
There are no set guidelines on what your mood board design needs to look like. But for the simplicity of this exercise we will search through canvas templates by searching ‘mood board’ and selecting a template from there. I'm going to use the first one listed.
Upload your photos onto canva and start dragging them into the frames on the design. They will snap right in. Keep playing around with your arrangement until it feels just right!
Mood board Example
The following example will be a brand mood board for Beach Bums, a fictitious toddler bathing suit brand.
Mission Statement: Curating the softest, most whimsical fabrics for tiny humans to explore, play and make memories in
Core Values:
Play
Dream
Happiness
Brand Words:
Playful
Whimsical
Comfy
Cheerful
Modern
How to create a colour palette easily in Canva
Another super useful tool is Canva's 'Photo Colors' which produces colour swatches of the prominent colours in the photograph of your choosing. First click on one of the solid colour squares then the solid colour block on the top tool bar. As you scroll down you'll see 'Photo Colours' with small image icons and a curated colour palette beside. I ended up using the colours via the 'Sunshine State of Mind' photograph on my board but decided to replace the darker yellow with the brighter colour found in the top left image. It's up to you! Keep playing around with these until you feel happy with how they tie into your board.
Step 4: Download your mood board!
You now have a beautiful mood board to inspire the rest of your visual brand. You can save it onto your computer - I suggest the .PNG format. You can also print this out and hang it on your wall or keep it somewhere for a quick reference guide the next time you are creating branding material for your business.
Once you have your mood board defined you can go on to create the rest of your visual brand, such as choosing colors, fonts, patterns, etc. I use the mood board to guide the rest of the brand development.
xo
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