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Mood Board Template: Effective Communication, No Words Required

MERCEDES April 4, 2018

Using a Mood Board Template in your Business

A mood board sets the tone of a project while providing necessary framing and expectations. A mood board template is used to get a grasp on visuals. Sometimes called concept boards or theme boards. The purpose is to communicate ideas that you can’t put into words. A mood board template is a tool to display plans and inspiration visually.

Reasons to Use a Mood Board Template

Sometimes there are concepts and ideas we need to get across to the boss, coworkers, and clients that are difficult to explain. Concepts and feelings are not easy to put into words, so you will often find that creative businesses use mood boards. However, mood boards can go a long way even in companies outside of creative fields like Graphic design and Fashion.

If you have employees working in groups, clients you need to sell your ideas on or you just want to get your thoughts organized why not use a mood board template to help you get there. Here are three great reasons why this is a good idea.

Enhance Communication

Give your customers, team and your boss a deeper understanding of your thoughts and ideas. Using a mood board is an impactful way of bringing all of these people into your world. If helping people to understand your concepts isn’t enough here’s a better one for you. Often visuals can move the needle on a project that has stalled due to lack of communication or understanding. A stalled project means less money in your pocket. A mood board can help grease the wheels of understanding and keep your projects moving. An understanding between you and your clients means more money in your pocket.

How to Make a Mood Board Template in PowerPoint

Curating Your Board

When it comes to visually organizing your inspiration images, there is only one rule here. Put everything in that you love and get rid of most of it. Be generous while collecting but brutal when you curate. Less is more, that’s true even of mood boards.

Your job is to create an impact, not confusion and overwhelm. Don’t be afraid to add things. Pour everything you have into it. It’s okay if they don’t make sense. You’ll be surprised at how things come together.

What to Put on Your Board

You can include things other than images too. Words, metaphors, letters, textures, patterns, shapes, colors are also important parts of establishing a mood. If you feel they belong on your board, then put them there.

Gathering Inspiration for a Mood Board

Online & Digital Media

First stop is online. Images are everywhere on the internet. Surf the web and save images using your print screen function on your keyboard or by using a tool like TechSmith’s Jing.

Jing is a screen and video capture tool that I use to collect tons of ideas and inspiration from the web.

Physical Media

Magazines, newspapers and other print media are all great resources. Sometimes the best thing you can do is get offline and go back to physically flipping through the magazines your target user would read.

You can also go through industry publications for ideas. However, don’t be reluctant to venture outside of your industry to get a different perspective.

Your Environment

Luckily most of us are attached to our cell phones and pulling out a phone or camera to snap random pictures of, well, anything is not something anyone notices these days. I’ve taken close up snaps of floor tiles in crowded public places.

Twenty years ago, taking pictures like this would have been considered odd, but it wasn’t. Instead, people went over to see what was worth taking a picture of on the floor.

Take pictures of everything that inspires you. Keep a collection you can access whenever you need inspiration. Take photos of everything. Fascinating, inspiring, weird, anything that strikes emotion in you.

Collect those pictures. Someday they may be valuable to you. The best part is they’re yours. Use them for inspiration, but you also have the flexibility to use them in your final projects as well.

Consider Copyright When Creating Mood Boards for Your Business

Copyright infringement, yes I said the big bad words. There can be a fine line between what is used for inspiration and what makes it into your final work. Be aware of this.

A mood board is used to get a message, or a feeling across is one thing but using a mood board full of images and typography that is not licensed could potentially become an issue if any of those images make it to your final designs.

An important question to ask yourself is how much influence does the mood board have on a final project? Usually, copyright issues are not a problem. Especially if you’re using demo fonts and sample images you plan on paying for once the project has started. Still, as a business owner doing business online, this is an issue that you need to know well.

For more information on copyright check out this article from the University of Cincinnati law review, Copyright Law Defining the Line Between Inspiration and Infringement.

Download Premade Mood Board Templates

Download our free mood board templates in a PowerPoint file. If you’re using your mood board for branding your business, get a more in-depth look at branding with mood boards in this article.

Six Ways to Use a Mood Board

Here are a few instances where you might consider using a mood board to communicate your ideas.

Brand Identity and Vision

This one is no surprise, I’m sure. Branding is vitally important to creating a cohesive trustworthy company. You, your team and your clients all have to buy into your brand. Not only the physical and visual elements of your brand but also your brand personality, style, and values.

If you don’t even know what and who you are as a company how can others create a meaningful business relationship with you? No one can buy into what you believe if you don’t know what you believe.

If you’re running a small business and design is done by you or your staff then getting your thoughts together and organizing them can save you a lot of time and frustration later on down the road.

It will feel time-consuming but trust me, getting focused from the start means you don’t have to scrap days or weeks of work to go in a new direction. Another drawback of not having a clear vision for yourself and your team is the strong possibility of sending mixed messages about who you are as a company and at a more granular level getting off track in your projects.

Sample mood board template for business branding

Personas

I find it helpful to have a broader emotional connection with my personas. A mood board template can help you breathe some life into your brand personas. Having someone in mind when you create products is extremely helpful. Why not go the extra mile and have pictures that represent your persona?

Here are a few things you can include. However, don’t limit yourself, you can put anything on this mood board:

Cities where they might live
What car they drive
The family
The house they live in
Where she works
Activities she enjoys
Places she likes to go
The books and magazines she reads
How she spends her time
What products she uses

Immerse yourself in your persona’s life, where she works and what she does all day. Having clear visuals for your persona(s) will help you think of them as real people. This mood board is her life, her office, her work how can you help her?

I know you’ve seen the boardroom with tons of charts and graphs to demonstrate what progress the company has made. These are visuals, yes. Not the visuals I had in mind though.

Check out these Persona Boards by Jayna Wallace on Flikr.

Project Visuals

Mood boards are great for planning a function or event for your company. Gather your ideas, have your team gather ideas and get together to create some mood boards.

The visuals will create a more productive planning experience for everyone. It’s difficult to imagine what someone else is describing. If the images are already there, it may spark even better ideas. What’s important is to set the tone for your project.

When working with a team on a project plan, a mood board template can help put project goals and expectations into perspective.

Take a look at these two examples of Luxury. Both of these boards represent the same thing but in different ways. The first is old money, for a more mature demographic. The second board exemplifies youth, new money and is targeting a younger audience.

Marketing Campaign Planning

Marketing campaigns are an essential part of doing business. I would argue that how you sell something is almost as important as what you sell. Putting together plans, style, mood, and message for an entire campaign is a big task.

You want to make sure that your message does not change or confuse your market. A mood board template can help define how you want to communicate across multiple layers of an ad campaign.

Social Media Planning

A mood board template is perfect for social media planning. A mood board allows you to think on a bigger scale than merely putting up quotes with your brand colors.

If you have a brand style guide and you know your personality (as a company) use all of that to create a mood board for social media images and messages that have a more profound emotional impact.

Remember a mood board template is a tool for drawing out a feeling that is difficult to get across verbally. Putting together social media messages like this can set a specific and deliberate tone for your social profiles.

Grouping of Visual assets

This one is more about organizing than it is about inspiration. Collecting images, words, colors and all of the things you want to use to inspire you is fine, but it’s the process of putting those things together, moving them around, removing, adding and combining that will create the inspiration.

The benefit of having everything in one place can give you a birds-eye view of what you’re putting out into the world. An image put out on Facebook, and another on Twitter means nothing. That said, in the grand scheme of your message, does everything you put out on social media represent your business well?

Another example of using a mood board for organizing is in creating presentations, reports and other documents where you will use the logo’s patterns and other brand graphics. How everything will fit into a cohesive set requires a strategy.

Presentations and Sales

Presentations and sales pitches are a great way to use mood boards because the visuals can inspire your clients to act. I touched on this earlier but I think it’s worth repeating. Visuals will help your clients to see the possibilities. A mood board layout can ignite a desire that a simple explanation cannot.

There is a lot of power in visuals. Showing your clients the possibilities of how things could be can remove some anxiety of not knowing. Uncertainty is what causes reluctance to act. Visuals that create emotion go a lot further than charts, graphs, and diagrams.

Setting the Tone Using Words

Words are powerful especially when you choose them wisely. One word can inspire and direct the story you want to tell with your visuals.
I’ve heard a picture is worth 1000 words, but one word can elevate a thousand pictures so don’t take them lightly.

MoodBoard Template Resources

Make sure to check out all of our resource roundups for images, fonts and clip art you can use with your mood board template. All of these resources are free for commercial use, so you are free to use them in your mood board and your work. We put out new roundups once a month. Check out our Valentines day, Easter, St. Patrick’s day and coming soon, Mothers Day roundups.

If you’re looking to set the tone with fonts, check out these 50 stylish fonts. You might also like this post which explains all about font personalities and mood.

What’s Next?

Check out some of my more granular branding topics like choosing your color palette and fonts. If you want to learn more about font pairing and typography resources, I have some great articles for that as well.

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