How to Create Moodboard?

In design, one of the biggest issues is inspiration. Often designers complain about where to take inspiration from. In this article, we will discuss Moodboard which is one of the best ways to get inspired from your design to design more creative visuals for your website or application. Moodboard is a collection of all the visual elements that are required to design a complete website or application. It will help you become more creative, when you have all your visual elements in one place, you can take inspiration from one element to create a new one. We will also discuss how to create Moodboars for your website or application design.

How to Create Moodboard?

What is Moodboard?

Moodboard is a collection of all the visual elements that are required to design a complete website or application. In design terms, Moodboard is a collage of every visual element present in design – from colors, animated GIFs, vectors, and words to typography as well. With Moodboard the aim is to bring together all the visuals of the design in order to get inspired from them to improve those elements or create new ones. It is called Moodboard because it represents the mood of your design.

The most important reason why designers create Moodboards is that it helps them become more creative, when you have all your visual elements in one place, you can take inspiration from one element to create a new one.

How to create a Moodboard?

Follow these steps for creating a Moodboard for your design.

Step 1. Define your idea into visuals

The idea behind Moodboards is to communicate the design style using visuals, for that the first step would be to have a rough idea on how you want the final design to be and design basic visuals according to it. This can be done by answering these questions:

• What type of application or website am I creating?
• Who are the competitors?
• Is there any similar exiting application or website?

Step 2. Choose any resource for creating simple boards

One of the best resources to create a moodboard would be InVision Board, Google Slides and Pinterest, other than these you can use your preferred wireframing tool or UI designing tool like Figma, Canva etc.

Step 3. Write all the elements you need for the Moodboard

The next step is to write all the elements you will need in the board in order to create the Moodboard. Writing all the visual elements needed you help you ensure that you don’t forget any crucial component of the Moodboard in the coming steps.

Step 4. Create or Borrow all the Visual elements

The next step is to create or borrow all the Visual elements that you just wrote in previous step. These visual elements includes everything from typography to imagery, from Photos to Animated GIFs etc.

Step 5. Curate Visuals

The final step of the process is to curate all the visuals you collected from the step 4 and bring them together in the board in form of a collage. This collage would be a good representative of the design style you want in your actual final product (website or application) and with that your Moodboard is ready.

Importance of Moodboard

The importance of having a Moodboard in your design can be understood by the following points:

• Defining a vision: A Moodboard sets the mood of a design and acts as a collage of all the ideas you had for your design. All this helps in defining a vision for the design to follow. A Moodboard would ensure that other designers working in the team or even you don’t deviate from the actual vision or mood that you have defined in the Moodboard.
• Sharing ideas: In design, sharing ideas in written format is not very effective and leads to miscommunication. Meanwhile Moodboards are very effective way to communicate your ideas about the website to your team and other teams in the organization. Other team member can easily find all the visual ideas at one place.
• Communicating with clients: Moodboards can help in communicating with your clients, a client can find out all the visuals at one place hence it becomes easier for the client to suggest some improvements. Specially for the clients who are not from design background, it becomes easier to get a high level overview of the design using Moodboard.

Best Practices

Some best practices to keep in mind while designing Moodboards are:

• In order to get free imagery and graphics you will need for your Moodboard, the best resources would be Unsplash, Nappy and BlackIllustrations.
• For better and more professional images and graphics that are paid, the best resources would be diversityphotos.com, Adobe Stock and istock.com
• Other than visual elements, you can also add short description that will help you remember some important points you thought about your design later when you design the application or website.
• Always remember that the Moodboard you create in the beginning of the your design is not permanent. Moodboards change as you go further in designing your application or website.
• When is comes to designing Moodboards, simpler is better. We must assume that the person viewing our Moodboard has to past experience in design and create a Moodboard that even people not from design background can understand.

Conclusion

Moodboard is a collage of every visual element present in design – from colors, animated GIFs, vectors, words to typography as well. Moodboard helps the designer get inspired from them to improve those elements or create new one, it actually sets the mood of the design by bringing all the visual elements at one place. Make sure to follow the points mentioned in this article in order to create a professional Moodboard for your next project.