Today, we are inviting MaeMae & Co. to start the week off for us with a tutorial that we are crazy excited about: “How to use a mood board.” MaeMae is the queen of genius inspiration boards, and she’s getting down and dirty with us on how to utilize that inspiration to help your design process–think wedding design or invitation design–these tips are crazy helpful! Take it away, MaeMae!
Creating a mood or inspiration board (both digitally and physically) is an important part of our design process at MaeMae & Co. It sets the tone for the entire project, and acts as a guide as we move through designing each element of the project. However, if you’ve never worked with a mood board before, we realize that the concept can be a bit confusing. Next time you work with a creative who is using a mood board (or next time you make one for yourself!), keep these two tips in mind:
1. It’s all about the feeling: The point of an inspiration board is to create a visual vibe for your project. It is not a place to nail down specifics like exact fonts or images, but rather think of it as creating a world that your brand, website or wedding stationery would live in.
When making a mood board, we focus on defining the color scheme, texture and graphics that best represents the project’s world. Rather than copying those inspirational images exactly, we use them to guide our design choices and find or create similar graphics for your unique project. For example, if we include an photograph of roses and an etched wreath in a mood board – we may combine those two visuals and create a vintage wreath made of roses for the project’s monogram.
2. But, you won’t get what you don’t see: While an inspiration board is about the vibe of the project, we do follow the visuals closely when designing. For example, if there are blocky fonts paired with a vintage script in a mood board – don’t expect to see modern calligraphy in the first design proof. We always encourage our clients to point out anything in the mood board that they feel is missing. So if they have their heart set on modern calligraphy, we always edit the inspiration board to include an image that represents their request. Similarly, if there is something on the mood board that a client isn’t digging, we’ll remove the image and replace it with one that better reflects their idea.
Check out our mood + method blog series, and follow us on instagram for more inspiration!