Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Rachel, and I'm from the Canva Design School. And today, we'll be talking all things mood board. Sometimes when you're creating a design or working on a project, you know exactly where you are going to take it. You can see it in your mind. It's clear and it's perfect. You know precisely what needs to happen and when. Unfortunately, your teammates, your client, or even your boss can't see into your brain. Mood boards are a great way to collect and display your inspiration, focus and communicate your ideas so everyone is on the same page before you start the heavy design lifting. In this video, we explore different styles of mood boards, why they're useful to the design process, and how to get started with a template. Okay, before we go any further, let's clarify what a mood board is. It's not a physical board. Well, it could be, but these days, with so many projects being worked on remotely, it makes sense to keep it digital. Mood boards are a collage of ideas that can include illustrations, colors, photographs, fonts, textures, and even descriptive words. When they all come together, they demonstrate the visual direction of our project. Actually, that would be a better name for it, a direction board. It's a central place where we can collect and display our inspiration for a specific project, like a visual representation of brainstorming. It lays the foundation for the overall theme of our design and gives us a place to start from. It means we can communicate our intent and get feedback before we've even started the work. This could save you a ton of money and time. There's nothing worse than putting time into creating something only to find out your client or boss doesn't agree with the original direction. It's much safer quickly pulling together a rough board so people can ask questions, give suggestions, and signal their approval at this very early stage. It's easier having these discussions about creative direction before the work is carried out and before money and time has been spent. It's also great to refer back to as we start designing, making sure that the original vision is still coming through. Anyone who has been involved in a creative project will know how quickly we can divert and find tangents and go off track as you start the ideation phase. Mood boards keep us focused. It doesn't mean that we need to keep them if we find a better way, but it does force us to analyze whether the new idea really fits or whether we just got a bit carried away. A mood board allows us to create with clarity. When we organize our elements visually, we can see what elements work well together and what elements clash. Mood boards are meant to be fun. It's a chance to collate the flood of ideas you have about a project. At Canva, we suggest three stages, collecting, collating, and collaborating. The first stage is collecting all of your materials in a visual form. Back when we would create physical boards, it was a process of flipping through magazines and books, photocopying or cutting out imagery to stick on a foam board. These days in a digital world, we still cut, copy, and paste, but it's using keyboard shortcuts. How about we dive into Canva and start designing a mood board? So I'm going to create a mood board for my imaginary cafe, Nourish. There's a couple of ways to start a mood board in Canva, and the easiest way is to start from a template. So from the Canva homepage, I can search the word mood board, and now I have access to all of these beautiful mood board templates. I like this one. So this is a really good starting point for our mood board. Now I can start adding all of my inspiration. It's good to start with some key words that are really driving my thinking or vision. So I'll hit T on my keyboard to create a text box, and I'm going to add five or six words. Should be a really good start, and will really set the direction for everything else. You can always add more as you go as well. These might be words that came out of a previous discussion or a meeting with a client or teammate. They might even have been on the original project brief. They could be brand values or positioning statements or taglines. The important thing is to just get them on the mood board first. Now let's select some new colors. The colors you choose should be ones that immediately spring to mind when you're thinking about the project. I'm just going to click on these colored elements already in the template and update those. It's also useful to include some lighter colors for contrast, so I'm going to update the color of this background texture to a light earthy beige. Again, these may change as you start adding more things, but it's an easy step to follow after choosing your keywords. Next, let's find some imagery that inspires the theme you are trying to create. So I'm just going to search some keywords here, and I'll use the plus symbol to add some multiple words for a narrower search. And here I will drag and drop this image to the canvas and fit them in the frames that are already there. I love these images. They really communicate the theme I'm going for. You know, images have a huge influence on everything around them, partially due to people being visual learners. I know that I am. And at this stage, let's just go for quantity, not quality. We can perfect the images later. Likewise, you can also upload images from your computer. So this is perfect if you have a inspiration folder with images, or you can always copy and paste from the web. So as you add your imagery, you may need to adjust your keywords or color swatches, and that's totally fine. It's an interactive process where each step should really influence both the ones before and afterwards. For instance, I found the perfect image for my brand, and I think I want to change my colors slightly to match this image. In Canva, this is really easy. You just select a color swatch and then click the color tile here. Open the color editor and scroll down to photo colors. Each photo will create a palette based on the image. Let's select this one. Now is the time to add some fonts to the mix. So use your keywords as inspiration. Click on a keyword, select the text here, and type in a style into the search bar. Remember, fonts have a personality, so choose ones that are in unison with your imagery and your colors. So texture is another element that often gets missed out on a digital mood board, but like fonts, it can communicate feelings to the viewer. And while they won't be able to touch or feel the sample, if you have the right image, the viewer will be able to recognize the feel you are expressing. Because it's digital, you can also think about adding video or sound to your examples. When you have a decent amount of samples and all of your inspiration is in one place, you can start to group things together and really express the right feeling. So make sure you don't repeat yourself. If images are saying the same thing, choose ones that say it best. Likewise with color swatches, ideally you want three or four colors, a primary, secondary, and an accent, or two. Normally that covers every base. Fonts should follow the same rule. You have a headline display font, you have a subhead, and a body copy. That should be enough. Wow, this is actually looking pretty amazing. Now it's ready to bring in some other stakeholders. So simply share a link to the mood board and they can jump in and add their own ideas to the board. This is a really great strategy to use to increase team buy-in and ownership of the ideas. They can give feedback, ask questions in comments, or even assign tasks. It's a great way to create an asynchronous discussion. Mood boards are forever evolving, but are really great to put together at the start of a project to create that alignment. And, you know, it's a great asset to refer back to later. I personally love to print mine out and have it in a place that I can see as a visual reminder of what I'm doing and where I want to go with my project. And well, that's it for me. So get on into Canva and play around with the mood board templates and see what you can come up with. Oh, hey, thanks for watching. Why don't you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out on our next video? And let us know what you think in the comments or just comment to say hi.