Organize your creative ideas and streamline your style with a mood board. Explore how to create a beautiful and useful mood board for events and projects with this complete guide.
Long used by designers, artists, and event planners, mood boards are a fantastic way to gather, organize, and convey creative ideas. Allowing you to bring together multiple sources of inspiration, from color and textures to photography and collage, mood boards help creatives stay focused and generate a creative outcome that fully represents their design ideas.
- Create a FREE Mood Board with Shutterstock Create’s Collage Maker
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Making an inspiration board is a simple and enjoyable process that allows you to be the creative director in your project’s process. Whether you want to create physical mood boards to display in your studio space or build a digital mood board that allows you to share your design concepts with others online, let’s explore where to source your ideas and how to create a mood board quickly and easily.
Mood boards can be physical or digital. Focus on photography or bring in mixed media, such as textiles and natural finds. Clockwise, from top-left: License these images via Julie julie, annokhotska, and Jana Kollarova.
What Is a Mood Board?
Mood boards are used by designers to help visualize the inspiration for a project and bring together a number of inspiring elements into a unified whole. The mood board may include a color palette, material samples, photographs, collage cut-outs, illustrations, and other visual points of reference that help the designer channel their ideas toward a more refined result.
Mood boarding allows designers to gather disparate or random visual elements into a single cohesive visual representation of a central theme. Sound complex? It isn’t!
Mood boards, like a journal entry or mind map, simply allow you to put all your ideas down into one (visually pleasing) place.
The Benefits of Creating a Mood Board
Why should you bother with creating a mood board when you could simply dive straight into your project? There are many benefits to creating a mood board, and it can be a very useful tool in the design process.
At the outset of a creative project, it’s likely you will have lots of ideas flying around in your head, and visualizing these as part of a mood board is a good way of organizing your thoughts.
Think of a mood board as a visual plan of action—it will become apparent that your collection of design elements will contain common themes, and once you’ve identified these, you’ll have a much clearer idea of how to embark on your design process.
- Try this mood board template collection for the perfect blank slate for your board
- Inspirational Interior Design Ideas for the Home
In addition, a mood board will act as a project anchor throughout the creative process. It can be easy to accidentally disappear down the rabbit hole when working on a creative project, but the references gathered on your mood board will help steer you back toward your original goal.
Note that you don’t have to be a professional designer to benefit from a mood board. You’ll find that gathering inspiration together can be extremely helpful if you’re planning an event—think wedding mood boards—or even pulling house ideas together with an interior design mood board.
What Are the Different Types of Mood Board?
Mood boards can be physical or digital, and there are plenty of techniques and tools for creating both physical and digital boards to a really high standard.
Physical mood boards can be attached to the wall of a studio or office space to provide a consistent reference as the designers work. You can use a memo board, pin board, or mesh board as a foundation for your mood board, which allows you to add design elements as you work and bring in 3D elements, like textile swatches, color samples, and found materials.
Alternatively, you can print a mood board template, and tack your inspiration elements to the printed sheet.
Digital mood boards offer a different style and, arguably, more flexibility, as you can edit the mood board as much as you wish. You can also share a digital mood board with collaborators or colleagues, allowing you to work remotely on a shared design project.
You can create your own digital mood board using a mood board template (see below for a tutorial), or use an online mood board app, such as Pinterest or Shutterstock Create’s Collage Maker tool.
Create a digital mood board easily using a blank mood board template. Clockwise, from top-left: License these mood board templates via PegasuStudio, ganjalex, and Thefirst7.
Other types of mood boards include brand mood boards, advertising mood boards (which bring together campaign inspiration and culture references), interior design mood boards, and fashion design mood boards, which combine textures, fashion photography, material samples, and color swatches.
Tips on Finding Inspiration for Your Mood Board
The best way to find inspiration for your mood board is to look at various sources, both online and in the real world. You might find inspiration in a photography book, at a textile retailer, or from a social media post.
Tools like Pinterest are useful for sourcing inspiration, but try to support ideas you’ve found online with inspiration sourced from elsewhere, including books, other cultures, the natural world, your environment, and your own interests.
A successful mood board often features one or two “hero” images, which will form the core references on your board. So, once you have collected a range of images, try to choose a single image which can be the true anchor of your board.
Once you’ve gathered imagery, such as photos, illustrations, and cut-outs, seek out more 3D design elements to bring tactility to your board, such as textiles, material textures, feathers, or small objects.
Finally, try to identify colors in the images you’ve gathered and try to condense these into a color palette of three to five color swatches.
Once you have your inspiration collected, you can start to bring these together into a mood board. Read on for a short tutorial on how to create a mood board for any design project.
How to Prepare to Make a Mood Board
Before you begin making a mood board, it’s important to take some time to get organized. Mood boards help you bring order and clarity into your thought process when done right. While they don’t have to be super detailed, they do need some structure to work effectively.
You should ask yourself the following:
- What am I trying to achieve?
- How do I want this to look?
- Is this mood board for personal or professional use?
Having the answers to these questions before you take the next step in the process will help you reach your design goals faster and create a useful asset.
How to Make a Mood Board
In this mood board tutorial, we’re going to walk through the steps of creating a digital mood board for a fashion design project—selecting and editing our images, dropping these into a mood board template, and customizing the design with shadows, textures, and colors for a unique look.
In this short beginner’s tutorial, we’ll create a digital fashion mood board with a dark tropical theme.
For this tutorial, you’ll need a vector mood board template (like this one) and access to vector software, such as Adobe Illustrator. You’ll also need a bank of inspirational images to use on your mood board.
The images used on the board in this tutorial are:
- Woman posing with a paradise flower (License this image via NatashaRamenskaya).
- Dramatic coastal landscape (License this image via Iriskarightnow).
- Street shot of a woman’s shoes (License this image via andersphoto).
- Fiery-throated hummingbird (License this image via Ondrej Prosicky).
- Close-up of teal eyeshadow (License this image via Seprimor).
- Teal rock texture (License this image via NatalyFox).
- Orange velvet fabric (License this image via Sittipol Sukana).
Save the images to your computer so they’re easily accessible as you build your board.
Step 1
Open the mood board template in Adobe Illustrator. In the Layers panel (Window > Layers), lock the top Shadow layer and bottom Background layer to allow us to work on the Moodboard layer.
Select one of the polaroid frames and Right-click > Ungroup it, so you have only the rectangular white frame selected.
Step 2
Go to File > Place, select one of the images on your computer, and Open it, placing it onto the canvas and scaling it to roughly fit the polaroid frame. Then Right-click > Send Backward to send it behind the white frame.
Select both the image and the white frame in front of it, and Right-click > Make Clipping Mask. This will place the image inside the polaroid frame.
You can double-click on the image to select it directly and scale or move it within the frame.
Repeat the same process with the other polaroid frames, ungrouping them and placing images behind them, before creating clipping masks. Try to select images with common colors, themes, and a range of textures and image styles.
Here, I’m looking to make a fashion mood board themed on a dark tropical style, with orange and teal green as the dominant colors.
Step 3
Once you’ve populated your mood board with images, you can return to the Layers panel and the Background layer. Use the Eyedropper Tool (I) to pick up colors from the images, saving these as swatches to use on your background.
Select the rectangle shape on the Background layer, and adjust the Color Fill from the Swatches panel (Window > Swatches).
I’ve gone for a dark teal green to complement the images on the board.
Step 4
You can bring in depth and texture to your board by going to File > Place and choosing a texture image such as this one to set behind the Background layer.
Adjust the Opacity of the colored rectangle on the Background layer to Soft Light to bring the texture through. You can also adjust the Opacity of the texture image to make it more subtle.
Finally, unlock and make visible the Shadow layer at the top of the Layers panel to bring a soft depth to the mood board.
Great job! You can now File > Export or print your mood board to share online or pin up above your desk for reference as you work on your designs.
Your finished mood board!
It’s also easy to reuse your mood board template to create different mood board designs, such as this clean and minimal wedding mood board. Simply switch up the colors and images!
License these images via Rawpixel.com, Eduardo Rocha Paz, Pavlo Melnyk, Jevgenija ZUK, Mike_O, nadtochiy, and Jorietha Rabie.
Conclusion: Organize Your Inspiration with a Mood Board
Whether you’re working on an interior design project, preparing for a photo shoot, or planning a wedding, a mood board design can really help to organize your ideas and give you a strong visual direction going forward.
If you’re looking for even more mood board inspiration, try these FREE mood board templates for summer, or discover the perfect atmospheric stock imagery to use on your mood board templates.
License these images via Rawpixel.com, Eduardo Rocha Paz, Pavlo Melnyk, Jevgenija ZUK, Mike_O, nadtochiy, and Jorietha Rabie.
