Speaker 1: What is a mood board, what is it for, and how do you create one? In today's video, I will answer these questions and show you my process to create one. A mood board is an arrangement of images, text, and other elements to set the style or concept for a design project. Normally brand identity and logo, but you can apply it to packaging, websites, or any design project. And it helps to bridge the gap between what the client wants his company to be known for and actually executing the design in its own unique way. If the mood board is done well, it sets up the visual direction for the brand from the very beginning of the design process, ensuring that it stays cohesive with the essence of the brand. So first, you wanna have that brief filled out from the client after you have that initial meeting. And this is a real life project that I have from my client. It's from a survey company for e-commerce sellers. They found me through the Amazon seller community. So I'm going through the different brief. I'm pulling out these different keywords that are gonna help me to inform the actual mood board so I can use these words to search for images and style and inspiration for the mood board. So smart, luxury, classy, human, tech, survey, sales. These are different keywords that are gonna really help me. And also one point is the client did mention in the call that he liked bold colors, bold red and blue. Next step is, before I go to Pinterest, is I like to do a bit more research into the successful competitors. So I'm looking at other survey companies, I'm taking screenshots, I'm doing a search to see other successful competitors, which is going to help me understand what colors they use, what look they have, so I can make sure that I differentiate this client from theirs. Now it's time to go to Pinterest and search for those keywords that I had extracted from the brief to get that imagery going. I'm gonna create my own Pinterest board. This is not the mood board. This is a Pinterest board that helps me to put all inspiration together in one place so I can easily access it and use it for inspiration for my mood board. So first I'm going through and putting in this smart tech brand. That's what I'm looking for first as just a keyword to see what comes up, what kind of imagery, what kind of logos. I'm looking for fonts, for images, for colors. All of this is going to inform the overall design once I do the brand identity. So this is going to be just inspiration at this point. Now I'm looking through at survey as a keyword or a survey brand to see kind of what images and fonts they use as well as styles for their logo and any colors. Just to get a sense for it, I'm gonna add some of them to the Pinterest board as well. Now, because the client had asked me to do red in this color, in this brand, I'm looking just to get some cool tech red colors, looking at brands that have used tech in their specific logos and their specific identity systems and seeing if there's anything that can give me some inspiration for this e-commerce seller brand. So I'm just going through, checking it all out, saving a bunch of them. Now I'm gonna search luxury tech brand because that was another keyword. So you see, you're just using these keywords that you extracted. That's why it's so important to get that brief from the client so you know what to be searching for and you're not just blindly looking for inspiration and you have something that they wanna be known for, they wanna have the feel for, and it helps you to choose the right things in your specific search. Now, another thing they really wanted to be known for was human. They didn't wanna just be tech. They wanted to have a human element or connection. So I'm just searching again the keyword human and adding it with tech brand to see if there's anything interesting that comes up. Sometimes there's not that great stuff and you kind of have to dig a little further, but I wanted to just see what came up in this search as well. So now I'm looking at my Pinterest board that I created for this project. You see all the different variety of logos, fonts, color schemes, layouts, designs that I have as inspiration that I can now continue and go and create my mood board. But before that, we're going to actually do one more step, which is going to unsplash to get some other imagery that can help to inform the style and the mood of the design. So I'm searching some cool keywords here like red and blue to see what kind of different geographic shapes, how the colors were used, and going through and just downloading a bunch of these so that I can also use those for the mood board. So as well, in addition to unsplash, I like to go to Google images because if I search keywords here, sometimes it'll pull some awesome imagery. Not all the time. I actually prefer unsplash to Google images, but sometimes there's some cool stuff. So I'll just be searching some of these keywords and have those downloaded so I can also use those for the mood board. There's another thing I just wanted to make sure that I got in the mood board was this human touch. Wanted to use kind of images of eyes and see what I could have and pull from that for the mood board as well, because yes, it's a tech company. Yes, they're the e-commerce survey company, but they also want to have this human element and be known for that. And I think that using some point of images about humans and eyes and such, that'll help to communicate that. So now it is time to put it all together into the mood board. So I use InDesign. This is a template that I've created and I'm gonna import the images into those black boxes. And then the little circles are going to be where I put the colors. So now I'm gonna go back to my Pinterest board and I'm gonna find images that I want to use in the mood board. I'm gonna download those and I'm gonna have them with those other images I downloaded from online. So I can use these all together and to create the look that is going to bridge the gap between what the client wants to have his company be known for and actually how to visually represent that in a design. So that's what the mood board is about and that's what we're gonna be creating now. Now I'm putting all of my images into one folder called images. So I can easily access them as I'm importing them into my document. So now it's time to actually import the images into the mood board. So just so you know a trick on InDesign is clicking on the box and then doing command D will import the images that you want into the document. So I'm going to be putting in a bunch of images, some I'm gonna change around, but I wanna have those different keywords we were talking about at the beginning, the human, the luxury, tech, smart. I think that red really helps to add this warmth, light bulb, human point to it. When I'm going through the actual colors, I'm color picking from the images so that I get the color palette that I want, what the mood board represents. And I really wanna make sure that it doesn't just have red in it. It also has the blue to compliment it. And then this kind of nice warm skin tone that helps to add that human connection that can be used in accent colors and maybe in buttons and such throughout their brand and their website. It's good to be thinking with the end design when you're doing the mood board and how you would need a certain elements in the color palette to represent this best. Then when I'm putting together the presentation for the client, I make sure that I have a very exact specification on why I chose images, why I chose certain type styles, and why I chose the colors I chose. And it all has to go back to what you are trying to communicate in that mood board. Going back to the keywords that they specified, human eyes, faces, tech, these are all about the human connection. So I'm explaining why those images are there. About the type style, I wanted to use a sans serif to make sure that that was representing tech that is often used in the tech industry, which this e-commerce survey company is about. And then color inspiration. Why did I choose red and blue? And why did I choose that human color? And these are points that they need to have backed up so that when they're looking through this, oh, it's just because the designer liked it, it actually has some backing up research, some backing up information that can inform the decisions. And that's super helpful. Now, the next step would be to get this whole presentation approved by your client so that you can move into the actual execution of the design. And that really helps to ensure the client and you are on the same page when you're moving forward and you don't waste time creating just beautiful designs that then the client hates. We really don't want you to be wasting your time on that. So you always need to make sure you do back up your presentations, show the competition, show why you chose those different points, and it's going to help sell your mood board better so that the process moving to the next stage is gonna be smoother and easier. You also need to explain how it's going to connect with their ideal customers. Sometimes I'll even put a whole section in there about demographics and what that specific target audience likes, what colors they don't like. And that helps to back it up even one step further aside from just how to differentiate from your competitors, but what's going to connect with the ideal clients. So once this is approved, you can then move forward and create your project, whether that's the brand identity, a logo, packaging, or a website. Now, I'm gonna note that sometimes I do like to submit the mood board along with the logo and mockups for identity projects I'm designing for clients when I feel confident in the direction of the mood board at the beginning. But as a general rule, doing the design after the mood board is agreed upon will save you the most time. So let me know if this was helpful for you in the comments and any questions that you have about mood boards, also ask those in the comments. And be sure to like this video and subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and I appreciate you being here. I'll see you next time. ♪♪♪