Moodboards are an excellent start for any project to explore different visual themes, styles, and concepts and get your many far-out ideas into focus. It’s good to keep the ideas on a mood board abstract, lucid, and not too literal.
The purpose of this set of mood boards is all about you. Please introduce yourself using visuals. Please make a “me”- mood board. What is your brand? By that, I don’t mean a logo but rather what makes you unique. Anecdotal imagery to show values you have, concepts that inspire you, the food you like, the things you love, the stories you tell.
The mood boards should be explorations using pictures, textures, shapes, colors, smells (you can write those down). You can find sources on dastner.com/moodboards, on the internet, your photos, and books, scrapbooks, sketches, or on the street, anywhere.
Group those ideas into the five category boards. Once you start working, more ideas will come up and form clusters. After that, you will see some core ideas begin to crystallize. You will find that it’s hard to make decisions, but don’t overthink, do, and move to the next idea; not everything has to be explained; it might make sense later on. Let’s vary the sizes of the pictures; otherwise, you can arrange them however you like.
Delivery: Physical collage or post PDF slides (horizontal, so we can share them onto the screen in class)
Concept
Like a squirrel collecting nuts to save for winter, or a stylish car for a man’s perfume, or an antelope for African dance music, or a telegraph pole for connections. What abstract concept could you be?
Composition
Is the space feeling wide or narrow, spikey or round, plushy or hard, soft, or hard, aligned along a grid or floating amorphously.
Color
What colors describe you (can be many)? Grab a color palette from any picture. Are the hues saturated or gray, bright, or dark, electric or taupe?
Typography
You can choose actual typefaces, but they could also be abstract shapes or a zoomed detail of a letterform; any form can give a hint to the font, style, or period in history.
Icons
Think of Icons as representatives, primary, raw and immediate. They are between letterforms and images, yet, they are not as detailed as some illustrations. They nedd to be simple shapes. I.e. round represents unity, a swoosh is movement.
We will eventually make these into a poster or booklet, but for now, we will use them as visual helpers for a 5–10 mins presentation to introduce yourself in class next week.
Resources
Sites to find pictures:
• www.pinterest.com
• www.designspiration.net
• www.thisisnthappiness.com
• www.Behance.com
• www.typographicposters.com
• Gurafiku
• Japanese Design
• Zora.co: really cool inspiration, but also idea of rights
• Are.na: make mood boards and explore other people’s boards, better than Pinterest
for UX/UI design:
https://mobbin.design/
or I have a folder with tons of pix I collected
Templates
• You can start with one of mine as a blank I use these to build mine, but you should build your own once you feel comfortable.
• This has a helpful template to download, but it’s always better to make your own
www.styletil.es
I start everything with a mood board. Life should be a mood board, like “where do you see yourself in 5 years”. This is the most fun part of the job, the time where you get more and more hyped up. Mood boards are a great tool to explore different visual themes, styles, and concepts. Make them from a “gut” instinct. Don’t try to explain or justify any decision. Work fast and don’t worry about mistakes.; at first glimpse at least.
They can be done using Pinterest, but I find that it is somewhat limiting and uninspiring. One cannot change size or relations as quickly as in photoshop. However, use Pinterest to search for trends and keywords, over time I started building my own library of images (you know, there really is an image library on 42nd St, I haven’t used it for a long time since the internet became one).
For example: on The Doctor’s Cohn website is a website with information for older people, They talk about health and retirement, for instance (also an excellent sponsor opportunity). So I chose the image of two squirrels gathering nuts for winter. In this case, I showed the client the boards, and they found it rather funny. Usually, I wouldn’t show clients the mood boards. It just leaves them confused. It takes practice to make or read them.
Through the design, I often take a look at the initial mood boards to help me make decisions and check if the ship is still sailing on course towards the goals.
Examples
Moodboards for www.thedoctorscohn.com
a website for Joan and Peter Cohn podcasts and archives of publications (www.thedoctorscohn.com).
Moodboards for Ansikun logo
my own logo when I did a lot more video work and DVD, besides building websites. Ansi (nickname some people call me, and ‑kun is the Japanese “boy” pronoun.
Moodboards for boyzandgirls
This is my first company, I am trying to bring some ideas of it back (aka midlife crisis). Clients (promoters) would walk into the office with a “How are you boys and girls?”, and that became our company’s name.
Parson’s “Me” posters mood boards
from a Graphic Design class I taught at Parsons. I asked the students to introduce themselves by means of mood boards. This is the entire lesson plan.