Mood board as the win-win scenario for a project presentation

What visual support you provide your projects with?

Milena Abrosimova
The Designest
4 min readOct 22, 2019

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The project presentation plays a significant role for any graphic designer. But how often does the topic about achieving the highest degree of spectacularity appear? If you’ve already faced this puzzling issue for countless times now, search for the solution in a simple word — mood boards.

Being an effective way to display the whole range of concepts and ideas put into a certain project, mood boards capture the audience attention and attract every single mind with a transparent flow of visions.

The Artistic Puzzle Technique

It doesn’t matter what stands behind the project, a pattern for its realization is always the same: movement from an inspirational strike to its physical realization by all the required means. In other words, evolving piece by piece to a completed composition. So mood boards serve as a miniature of this process, including a set of constructing elements and bringing the conception home to clients, colleagues or teammates.

Guess, the best thing about the mood boards is that they can be made with all kinds of materials: images, colors, textures, typography — anything! Once you put them all together, it gets easier to operate with ideas and brainstorm some pressing issues.

Tender girly-swirly moodboard by Olga Kuri
Mood Board for an interesting collection by Olga Kuri on Dribbble

Taking into consideration the sphere of use, mood boards get A+ for being universal! Due to possessing a strong visual power, it’s super easy to choose any creative filed and elaborate a project, when you’ve just started and want to see all the possible variants for its development.

Building a Perfect Mood Board

Before starting your own mood board, think about the amount of time you’ll spend on it. The whole process itself should be fast and easy, or else there is actually no need to waste time on working out practically one more project about the other project, it doesn’t make any sense! The faster — the better (apart from the good quality). Eventually, the perfection can be mastered through practice. But for now, we can share some helpful ideas with you on how to produce a lovely and informative mood board:

  • If everything looks natural you should know that you do it right. There is no need to overdo your mood board with illustrations: save some place for notes, font and texture samples scattered around.
  • Color and textures matter a lot. The engaging palette with nicely selected shades is very appealing. Match it with the right texture to let the audience feel the objects without touching them. Here any common associations can come in handy!
Shapes and colors on a moodboard
Color and Textures Matter a Lot
  • No one can present the mood board greater than its author. Sharing the ideas with co-workers in details works out pretty well, you may say, but the passion for a product is something unique and irreplaceable.
  • Using the professionally crafted templates for mood boards is a big support in organizing your ideas. They usually have all you need: an easily-changeable base for inserting all the required odds & ends. Just search for the word “mood board” on your favourite marketplace and tons of amazing templates will be available at your service.
  • Offline mood boards can be called the classic ones, there’s no need to focus only on a digital world. Get some tactile materials involved, like printed photos, fabric, flowers and all kinds of stuff at hand. Interact with the audience not only on the visual level and enable extra senses to perceive better.
Fashion moodboard templates by Pixelbuddha
Fashion Mood Board Templates by Pixelbuddha

Mood boards significantly facilitate work with complex structures in web and app design. Here social networks are sure to become your reliable source of images to express your creative intentions, seek for inspiration and pick diverse mood board elements. The outstanding Instagram, Dribbble and Pinterest have deserved their reputation as platforms, where the talented communities share their incredible designs, illustrations and opinions. So the ones, who’ve chosen the path of mood board presentations, should turn to these “golden mines”.

However, we still point out Pinterest as the main source: its visual search is an excellent tool for collecting all found treasures to your board and once you’ve finished, sharing them with the whole world in one click.

Mood boards have a right to be called the most helpful and impressive means of a project presentation. The numerous possibilities are accessible within this type of self-expression: release your creativity in a materialized way while starting a project, finding the best solution for a current one or screening the ready-made masterpiece. With a mood board at hand, people can read your mind like an open artbook. If you let them, of course.

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Milena Abrosimova
The Designest

A huge design geek, discovering the industry through the prism of modern values and social media communication.