Mood Board

Mood board method is great to visualize inspirations and ideas and therefore allows to more easily work through a challenge and an idea, while also enabling triggers for new inspirations and interpretations of a collected content to encourage new perspective and ideas.

What can you do?
Create a visual presentation or »collage« of inspirations for generating and expressing ideas of the solution. Don’t forget to keep an open mind, so you don’t limit yourselves. Follow the sequential steps individually or collectively.

• SELECTING MOOD BOARD THEME – Name your mood board and put down some initial ideas and notes before starting to collect inspiration.
• COLLECTING MATERIAL – Collect material based on the established theme of the mood board and »pin it« to the board. Is it inspiring words, websites, samples of objects, images, examples of motion and sounds (GIFs, videos, audios)? You can even add samples of colours, fonts, shapes etc. for finishing touches of the product.
• ORGANIZING MESSY MOOD BOARD – Arrange the ideas in a best composition. This process can take a while, because you’ll probably have more material than you need, and it might look scattered. Start by exploring composition and introducing hierarchy. Place a key element such as a logo to anchor your board and change the size and position of the remaining elements to indicate their importance and relationships to one another.
• EXPLAINING THOUGHTS – Write down some notes about thinking process and found ideas (not necessarily into too much detail – can be in the form of notes, labels, emojis…).
• DISCUSSING – When the first version of mood board is done, it’s time to sum up and present ideas to the whole group. Discuss the ideas and collect further suggestions.
• BUILDING ON YOUR IDEA – Consider and implement new suggestions/ideas onto the mood board and use it as fundament of solution development. You can even create multiple mood boards to explore different directions.