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How to make a mood board in 8 easy steps
How to create a mood board for your clothing brand in 8 easy steps
by Trudi Roach
Mood Board for Fashion Design| Create a Moodboard in 8 easy steps
How can a mood board help your design process, next season's product launch, or even help maximize your marketing efforts and boost sales?
A great mood board should capture your creative vision and inspire you to action.
Whether you're designing a logo, planning a new style, or an entire collection, mood boards can be a valuable asset when starting the creative process.
Mood boards have come a long way since the days of attaching printouts to physical boards or creating static PDFs. Digital mood boards can include videos, and animations and bring together remote teams—unlocking a new world of creative possibilities.
Brands and Designers may use different approaches although the steps remain the same.
But before we jump in...
What is a mood board?
Mood boards are an effective way to express your creativity and hone your design ideas. Use your mood board to help you stay focused as you grow your product-based business.
A mood board (or moodboard) is a collection of visual materials that evoke a particular theme, style, or concept.
It is a design tool that will help you stay focused and consistent as your clothing line develops. mood boards are a perfect tool when explaining your vision to others. It can be your team or your product developers, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, etc.
Plus it will help you continue one impactful theme from concept, through product, all the way to product description, to your launches and marketing concepts.
Mood boards are a collage of visual materials, videos, fonts, and colors. They're used to evoke a visual direction, a particular theme, style, or concept, or convey a mood.
What are the 4 components of a good mood board?
A mood board typically includes a combination of images, texts, photographs, and textures to explore and present an idea in a way that words alone cannot.
However, these design elements are not standalone features on a board.
Instead, these components combine to tell a cohesive story about a vision.
Designers, makers, photographers, filmmakers, and all types of creative professionals create mood boards to communicate their vision for a project.
They can be a powerful starting point in any creative process that captures the essence of something before committing to the final design.
In the clothing business and fashion industry, designers use mood boards to
· As a source of inspiration, sparking new ideas and fresh approaches.
· Communicate visual concepts and design direction.
· Conveying brand identity, personality, style, and values.
· Share themes with the marketing team to help drive excitement in-store and on websites
Follow these steps to unlock your creativity, hone your inspiration, and focus your design process.
In this guide, you'll learn the modern approach to creating a mood board.
Remember, the creative process is non-linear, so you may move back and forth between the steps as you go.
Step 1. Ideation - Set Your Mood Board Direction
Sit and brainstorm.
Think about the specific goals that you have for your board. Your goals might include what you're designing, sourcing from manufacturers, or what you want to make and launch.
· Visualize and explore creative ideas.
· Present color schemes, styles, and textures.
· Develop a collection, and select fabrics, colors, and silhouettes.
· Present creative ideas and themes for marketing campaigns.
· Convey the visual style, tone, and guide to set design directions.
Try to put into words what you are looking to do. The words can be descriptive, emotional, or specific. Here are some examples:
· LuxeSport
· GothCore
· Ethereal
· Deconstructed
· Vintage, 90's, etc
Or more specific theme ideas like
· Williamsburg nights
· Luxe Girl Party
· etc
You can think of this as a mind map of words that build around a central theme or idea.
Remember, a mood board is all about exploration, but it helps to define the purpose and goal of your mood board clearly. Understanding both of those things will guide what you put on your board.
Once you've decided on a direction, give your mood board a name and write down some initial ideas in a text note before you start to collect inspiration.
Pro tip:
Creativity often responds well to some constraints or limitations. Picking a single keyword, theme, color or style can be a great way to give some direction to your mood board.
Step 2. Edit Your Words:
Edit the words and inspiration down to 5 to 7 key ones that inspire you. These are the ones that you will use when you start your image search. Don’t worry about leaving any of your previous inspirational words or feelings out for now.
Let the words guide you and pick images that feel like they resonate with your words.
Step 3. Gather existing material
You don’t have to start with a blank slate….
Next, add in any existing visuals you may have collected. These can be images and logos, existing expressions of the brand, or design elements a client has given you.
And think about adding fabric swatches, trims, and buttons, any physical materials that are important to the overall mood you’re creating.
(You can take photos or scan the items if you are compiling a digital board).
Use these materials as the foundation to set your board's mood.
These might not remain in the final composition, but they serve as great inspiration.
Step 4. Add inspiring images
Now it's time to start your image research.
Collecting images is the most fundamental step in the mood board creation process.
And most creatives spend the most amount of time on this key step.
Try to find images that relate to the words that you’ve now selected for your project. Don’t second-guess yourself at this early stage, gather all the images that you like and that speak to you.
Select a mix of images, textures, and other visual elements that resonate with your concept and mood.
Choose images that evoke the emotions and feelings you want to convey. The style of imagery you choose to include in your mood board is what will have the greatest impact, so refer back to the existing material and use that to guide your selection.
If you keep a collection of images (or swipe) in an inspiration library, now's the time to look through it to see if you've already got something that could work.
I love to use Pinterest for image searches. Pin everything you love into one secret board.
Or better yet, hit the 3 dots on the top of a pin description and download your top pics to a folder you can pull from later.
And you can expand your search for visual inspiration on websites like Behance and Designspiration.
Don’t forget about free stock photo resources, such as Pexels or you can pull images from within Canva. If you’re using stock photos try to download everything into one folder so that you can filter them later.
Don't worry about organizing the images just yet; that step will come later.
Pro tip:
Now that you've established the direction for your mood board, add any written content you have. This might include brand values, positioning statements, words in the form of adjectives, tag lines, or any other parts of the brief that will inspire you and keep you on track.
Step 5. Add color, fonts & files
Color can be a great way to express a particular feel, personality, or energy.
Add existing brand colors or use tools like Coolor if you need a starting point for finding colors that complement the brand you're working with.
Another trick is to pick colors directly from the images and photos you've added to make the mood board feel cohesive.
In the fashion industry, color inspiration can come from swatches, paper, or other materials. I once visited the design office of a major fashion brand and the head of the product team had one brown crocodile Manolo Blahnik stiletto pinned to the design wall as inspiration.
Typography can play a key part in design and brand moodboards, so upload examples of fonts and type treatments. Typography galleries like Typewolf and Typekit are a great way to explore different font combinations and weights.
Step 6. Transform your mood board from messy to organized
This is where we start to edit the images that you have selected. Start to arrange your ideas to create the perfect composition.
Often, by the time you get to this stage, you will have already started to hone in on a cohesive mood or theme.
You will find that your images work with your original goal or no longer fit.
That's OK. You can work through this in the next step.
Start by exploring composition and introducing hierarchy. Place a key element, such as an image that captures the essence of what you're trying to convey and helps anchor the board.
Change the size and position of the remaining elements to indicate their importance and relationships to one another.
Get creative and overlap and crop images as you need to and don't forget, if you feel like an image doesn't quite work, swap it out or remove it. Remember less is more!
Organizing a messy mood board is an iterative process, and it's okay to experiment and make adjustments as you go along. The goal is to create a well-structured and visually compelling mood board that effectively communicates your creative vision, so take your time.
Pro tip:
Step away—the best creative thinking often happens in the idle moments when we allow our minds to wander. Go for a walk or listen to some music. Make space, be open to new ideas and connections, and embrace the mess.
Step 7: Review Your Mood Board
In step 7, spend some time with the images in your final edit. Then take a break for an hour or so, or a whole day, and then review everything again.
You may find you would like to remove or add images.
Or try swapping some out to see if the edit gets closer to your initial inspiration or further from it.
Step 8: Publish your Mood Board
It's time to print and post your mood board. Find a visible spot by your desktop, in your studio, or on your laptop so it's easy to reference.
Let your mood board continue to inspire you so that you build your product and grow your brand.
CONCLUSION
Now that you're done, your mood board can be used as guidance to developing your next product.
By using mood boards as a tool for visualization and inspiration, creatives can bring your vision to life and help customers and teams understand what the final product might look like.
Remain open to inspiration, wherever you are!
Mood boards should be ever-evolving throughout the creative process. They can adapt, grow, and change as your project progresses, and new ideas could strike you at any time.
Make sure you have an easy way to capture new ideas on the go.
Remember, you can always create multiple mood boards to explore different visual directions, seasons, and products.
Start your next creative project with my free mood board template. I’ll leave a link in the description below.
Not sure how to choose your images or can't figure out how to use this for your business?
Email me and I'll get right back to you!
