Why our team needs a new design method.
Despite being surrounded by geeky developers — I am the only designer among many coders — we have a common feature: creativity. As a team, we believe in the importance of design and that’s why I’ve decided to show them a design method I used while I worked as a product designer. Every two weeks we have a meeting where one of us presents a practical subject to the rest of the team. Thus, one team member investigates and explores something and shares the knowledge around. Brilliant, uh?
What is a mood board?
To get started let’s explain what a mood board is. It’s a technique to visualize ideas and concepts about any topic used by lots of professionals in creative environments such as designers, artists, publicists, film directors, etc. A mood board is literally a board, that could be digital or physical, where everyone can add any visual inspiration around a topic or concept. That information could be in different formats, be it a photo, illustration, quote, texture, color, typography… whatever that can give an extra input about the topic.
It’s worth remembering that mood boards do not show detailed designs of a project, they are used to collect the mood or the emotional feeling that the project should express. In other words, it describes what the project is supposed to make you feel. They are a useful tool to improve the collaboration between designers with clients or team members.
Why should we use mood boards (as a team)?
The main reason is to enhance the collaboration between different type of professionals. It is really important to speak the same language as a team. We can use mood boards to define the emotional part of a project and to have it as a reference when we have to design a new functionality, for example. Or we can define a new type of user for a new project.
Also,mood boards help to maintain the style of the design, the level of the functionalities or the tone of how we want to express the ideas and keep the focus of the project and its goals.
We could use it to find a new style for a design and involve clients in the process.
More obviously we could use them as inspiration for many aspects such as color palette, UI structure of the platform, type of icons, UX processes…
And it could be a kind of database for saving UI elements and UX processes that we find online.
How to create a mood board
In our case, the easiest way to start with this new method is to create a Pinterest account and share all the boards with the team members so they can take part from the beginning. Furthermore, we could print some of our boards and pin them in our office wall and them present in the workplace.
Curious to see our mood boards? Take a peek at our Pinterest account here:
As a designer in a team of developers, I think that we should use mood boards as a way to start introducing new creative methods in a software development environment. I know that it’s often a new world for this kind of professionals. But as a team, we need to be always really creative and innovative since we are building new software products and services for real people.
We just moved to a new office space and are hoping to create a great new mood board in one of our walls (we’ll keep you updated with the progress).
Thanks for reading!
