Create a Simple Mood Board
By Siân Morgan-Owen, The Admin Genie UK
Create a Simple Mood Board
What is a mood board?
A mood board helps you build your businesses visual identity.
It’s how you want your audience to feel when they see your brand. It’s your business personality represented through colours, patterns and images.
Why do I need a mood board?
A mood board is a great way to ensure your brand image is consistent across all your platforms. It’s also a really useful tool to share with other creative professionals you may need to work with, such as your Creative VA, Graphic Designer, Photographer, Social Media Manager to help them to communicate your business message.
It’s a great starting point when you are first creating your brand image or thinking about rebranding.
Create a Simple Mood Board
Your mood board can be digital or actual it’s entirely up to you. Personally I prefer a digital mood board as I find it easier…also there’s a lot less mess to clean up!
Your mood board can be as big and elaborate as you want. It will probably develop over time as you add more pictures and your brand grows and becomes more defined.
To create your mood board you can use programs/platforms like Publisher, Pinterest, Photoshop, Mural.ly etc. I like to use Canva (#CanvaQueen) because it’s simple and FREE (if you’re not on the PRO package). I use an A4 document (or US letter) Canva size, because it’s a printable size.
You want to add your brand colours with hex/RGB codes, your font names and how you use them. Then add pictures that represent you and your business. Think about how you want your audience to feel:
Calm, Energised, Joy, Relieved, Enthusiastic, Reassured, Relaxed, Motivated
Include pattern and textures on your mood board because these can form backgrounds to social media graphics or blog pages.
You can then take it a step further by adding word lists:
- Brand words – a list of the words you want your ideal customer to feel when they see your branding. That way you can ensure your social media imagery always reflects these words.
- Brand voice – a list of words or common sayings you regularly use. This could also be intro content you use when joining a new social media group or use when you are breadcrumb marketing.
Genie Top Tips
- Print your mood board and pin it to your wall so when you are breadcrumb marketing on your social media platforms your images will inspire you to reflect your brand in your comments. It will also help you get to your colour hex codes quickly.
- Keep a photo of your mood board in a folder on your phone. Then if you decided to create something on the fly whilst waiting for an appointment etc you have all your hex codes, font details and inspirational imagery with you.
- Treat your Pinterest and Instagram accounts like mood boards by posting images that reflect your brand image.
