How to Make the Perfect Mood Board

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Hale now I am a Senior Art Director at Disney and I'm pretty sure my level mood boards is the reason that I'm wearing on today. Moodboards are my favorite part of my job or one of my favorite parts of my job. And I really take pride in them. And people come to me for those moodboards. They know that I'm the person that will get that mood across. Whether it's for a photoshoot, whether it's for an illustration, or whether it's for a larger brand campaign. They know they can come to me. So today we're going to take you through how to make the perfect moodboard. We're gonna go through the why, why are you making this mood board? Is it for a photoshoot, is it for an illustration, is it for a logo project? And then we're gonna go through the resources that I use. What are my sources? How do I find the images or the illustrations needed to make the mood board that I make. And then we're gonna go through the ingredients. What is the perfect recipe to make a perfect moodboard? And then I'm going to show some examples of my favorite mood board. And on some of them I'll show you the mood board to the final piece and how those relate. And last but not least, we will give a project to you to make your own mood board. 2. The "Why": Let's talk about the why. Why are you making this mood board? What is the reason behind it? Because once you know the reason that will help facilitate what type of mood board you're going to make. Is it going to be having images? It's going to be heavy in logos and type treatments and colors. It all depends on what type of mood board you're going to make. For example, you can make a logo mood board. So we need to know the color, we need to know font, type references. And we didn't know what era potentially this logo is living in. If you're making a branding mood board, this is about the larger brand for your client. This can include lifestyle images and color, and Logo treatments, etc. All things that are needed to make a brand, especially if it's something that's going to have a brick-and-mortar. What does the interior design of the space look like? And then when you look at an ad campaign, you're trying to get the overall mood for what the idea is across. This one is more on a conceptual level, then potentially some of the other types of mood boards that are like photoshoot or illustration based. Speaking of photoshoot, these ones are really fun for me because I have some really great photo references and I'll talk about where I get them in a minute. Photoshoot mood boards are all about the tone and the color and the treatment of images that we're finding. And how did they feel cohesive for interior design, you might be pulling textures as well as furniture and there might be more overlapping elements for illustration, we're really trying to accomplish what is the illustration style? What are the colors? Is it photo-realistic? Is it abstract? And our moodboard is hoping to accomplish and answer those questions. And then maybe you're making a mood board about manifesting your dreams. Maybe you want pictures of places you want to go to, or maybe you're trying to express that you want to live in a giant mansion and then you want to have all of the designer things. Why do you want to make this mood board? And how do you want to convey that idea? Another really important thing to figure out for this mood board is the mood board for you, or is the mood board or for a client, if it's for you, you have a lot more freedom to play. Be messy, especially when you're doing your manifesting your dream idea. But if it's for a client, you have to think of how you can get your full idea across each element that you're showing in a mood board should represent something different. So that when you look at the thing as a whole, you can really get that main mood, an idea across. 3. Resources: Now let's talk about the resources. Where am I finding the images? How do I bring them all together? And what are my sources? You might say, this is actually my favorite part because of the research that you put in to find everything. It's kinda like a scavenger hunt or just the regular one. And this is the part that takes what's in your brain and puts it out into the world. Here's one of my favorite sites for Inspire. So first, we have Pinterest, which is really just a giant mood board site in itself. But what's really important here is the search terms, especially if I'm doing a photo shoot or if I'm doing an ad campaign or a manifesto mood board. So whatever I'm looking for, let's say it's Christmas time, I would do Christmas time aesthetic because what that does is narrows what type of thing you're looking for. So you know, you're gonna get Christmas time imagery, but it's gonna be a wide range of clothing or home decor or mood lighting. Also, when I'm searching for a photo shoot, I'll use search terms like photoshoot ideas or I'll do a flat lay or trending. I also really loved design inspiration. This is good to find references of posters and logos and more typographic graphic design references. It's very artsy and modern. It's a really good compliment. If you have too many lifestyle images or photoshoot images, this can balance your mood board. And then of course, we have to talk about Instagram. So I actually save a lot of inspirational posts. I can just go back to my saved folder and search through to find certain images that makes sense for my mood board. And I'll screenshot then crop them the right way and then add them to the mood board. I follow a plethora of photographers, artists, illustrators, designers, and I'm constantly picking up references that I can later use in a mood board. I also follow interior designers. Maybe my mood board isn't about interior design, but something in there can relate to what I want to get across in my mood board. For example, I do trend research boards, which are still a mood board, but they're relating to trends. If I'm talking about, say, checkerboard trending, I'll find it on floor tiles, but I'll find it on a cake decoration and I'll also find it on clothing. All those things can be found on Instagram, screenshot and put into one mood board. You can also search the hashtags, obviously on Instagram. That's why they're there. And that can help you find something for your mood board. And then I mentioned that on some mood boards, you want moving items to help convey a mood that you can't accomplish with just a static image. For that, I go to Giphy, give me I love, but it's kind of hard to find the right search terms for this. So I would just start anywhere. Let's say I'm searching something for work. I would type in Disneyland and I'll get some fun moving images and gifts. And then I can click through those and find something maybe more specific. Kinetic is a really good word to use if you're trying to find animation references, those can be good for logo projects. Or maybe you're doing a mood board about an animation style, okay? And then if we're talking about photography, I love Unsplash. Unsplash has really artistic, almost bespoke imagery that you can use that is entirely free to use and has really talented photographers and it's not super stock, like it's very moody in itself. And you can convey that specific mood in the photo and also what's in the content of the photo. I really use Unsplash for campaign mood boards and photoshoot moodboards. And then to supplement that, there's another site called stock C. This is really, really good for imagery as well. It has a different type of mood and it's sometimes called a little more amateur looking at the difference between stock C and Unsplash. Unsplash has more of a higher level mood that you can convey and in those images. And then stock C is more specific. It will find the region, the people, and have multiple images like a full photoshoot for one look. So you have a few more options within it and succeed. You do have to pay for the images, but I can just drag and use the watermark that is very subtle until I know that I want to use that image. 4. Ingredients: Now we're going to talk about how to bake the perfect moodboard with ingredients. One part of this, when part of that, and put it all together and it's perfect. But I should note that these are my perfect ingredients for a mood board. I think you should be able to take this learning today and make it your own. Some people really like to overlap there imagery in their mood board. Maybe they want to have their own illustrations in it, kinda make it feel a little more scrapbooking. That's not my style. Maybe that's your style and take what you learn from this and feel free to adapt. But first thing for my border ingredients is a variety of content. So I like to have some photos, some illustration, some logo, some gifts. And that variety is what makes it a really fun mood board. But then once you have all of these different elements, it's important to have something that brings it back together and makes it cohesive. For me, that's usually the color and tone of the imagery. There was also a mood board that I did where the cohesive element was spheres and circles. So there were some graphic circles, there were some flat lays that had circles in them. There was some lifestyle photography that had circles and all the gifts had moving spheres and circles. And that's what brought it together. And the color palette was kinda why most of the time, it's my color palette that brings everything together, or it's the tone of the image. If I'm going for a really light and ethereal, I want to make sure that all my references also have that light and ethereal tone because I might find an image with the perfect content, but it does have the same tone and light feeling as my other ethereal images in the mood board. And so I won't use it all either edit that image to have a lighter feeling oral, find another image. The next thing for me is a focal point. I'll make sure to stagger the size of my images so that there's one or two that's generally bigger than the rest. And that's the focal point. That might be the best image and might convey the mood the best. But either way, I want to make sure that there is a focal point within my Moodboard as the hero he might say. Then along with that, I don't want to overwhelm my audience. I don't want to overwhelm the mood, so I like to leave whitespace between my images. I think it makes it really clean. I think it helps make some sort of uniformity that kind of brings things together. It's another cohesive element for some mood boards. I'll actually put in the full color palette, especially if it's a logo or brand mood board, I'll actually bring bars of color into the mood board to really convey that these are the colors we're going to use. The rest of the moodboard is actually complimentary to that. And knowing that these colors are going to be the actual colors for the brand or the logo. It has a dual purpose at that point, the last ingredient that I put in my mood board is optional as well. I think this is kinda like a garnish. If it makes sense to you, I put in a moving element almost always. This might be my focal point because when you have one item that's moving, that helps bring the focus to that one space, I will have sparkly twinkling lights falling, and that is supposed to convey magic. And sometimes you can't get that full feeling by just a static image. Also, like I mentioned before, if it's for an animation reference, for our logo, for a animated spot, It's really good to have that kinetic energy or some other type of motion graphic reference. And that's what gifts can do for you. 5. Examples: Now we're gonna go through some examples. I'm very excited to share these with you and I will show you that it's progressed over my time of working on mood boards. And that will show that not everything is fast and solid on these rules for Moodboard. And you can take them as you will see how the execution works for you. So this first one is a mood board for a logo that I was working on. It was called artful ancestry. And it was a brand for creating vintage pieces and kind of giving them a new light. And so I was really leaning into that kind of heritage and vintage vibes for this mood board. You'll see here, I didn't use whitespace between my mood board, but I did use whitespace on my header and my description. I don't actually do a description anymore because I speak to it. But here you can see that I was really trying to convey vintage, elegant and Italian. So I was using Italian typography. I was using a Vespa to convey that, even though this is just for the logo itself, you can see that I'm bringing in other elements to help convey what the mood is. I also used a range from textured rustic feeling examples and then some that are brighter and New. And I'm using a mixture of modern styles with vintage typography. Because when you're creating a logo, It's not just about the logo itself because the logo is also going to tell a story and this mood board is telling that story before your logo comes to lay. Another thing you can see here is my color palette feels cohesive. We have some oranges and reds mixed with greens and blues. They're very vibrant. You can tell that that rustic feeling is coming across in some of those tones as well. Here's another mood board that I had made for that same project. This one has a little bit more of a bold distress feeling, that lettering press feeling. Alright, so this is another one that has a description below. It says retro Mexican street cars. So this is for a brand called Barrio burgers. It's in crescent heights in LA. And the vibe here is very much like this vintage and neon sign with these cool vintage cars. And it's a burger shop and it's supposed to feel very local and authentic. So you have the mixture of a hand lettered style as well as a neon sign. So how can we make those things work together? Feeling that Mexican vibe, I think you can see that the colors here are very neon and vibrant and it's a little bit busier than you might see in different. On this next page, you can kinda see how this logo came to life. They really wanted this car to be a part of the logo. So we have that vintage sign type field, but it's also hand lettered. This a moodboard is a little bit different than the other ones. This is a self-initiated project where I was trying to show that I could create a product and a soft lines line of clothing for Disney. So this is kinda me pitching what I can do. So in my mind, I really wanted to create a Jasmine slash Aladdin line, kind of in the vein Anthropology. So what I was doing is I was conveying the styles that you would see in Aladdin and a color palette and then varying different illustration styles that I was inspired by. Again, I left negative space between the images. I had a color palette in mind. I was showing illustration style. I was showing lifestyle photography, for example, the image on the top right. That's not really something that I would use for the soft lines, but it's conveying a minute. You're in a desert place. You're feeling really elevated with all the jewelry, the nice nails, and it's a little bit abstract. This next one is really fun for me. While I was working at Disney through quarantine, we were doing a lot of at-home projects too. People interested in working on Disney things while they're at home. So for this one, we're going to create a kind of DIY project and actually relate to products. So what we wanted to do was we wanted to create, tune town out of paper and have it be a table scape in the middle of your table. So it's parked party. It's part DIY is gonna be made of simple shapes. Very elementary, you might say, with primary colors and minimal design. On the left you can see we were trying to get that cityscape idea across. We are trying to show that it was gonna be a party with the bottom images. And on the right you can see that it was a table scape. So when you put that all together, you can see how it came to life. The fun part about this one is I actually got to construct the town. I got to do the photo shoot myself and I got to try on all the products. This is something that's very rare. It was just because of quarantine and limited resources. But normally, I would just do the mood part of this. I would select a photographer and select a stylus, and those people would help execute it. So obviously when I'm not the one that's executing on it, then moodboard is super important to convey all of the things I want to bring to life. Now I'm going to show you a photo mood board. This is for a photoshoot we were doing at alanine in Hawaii, which is the Disney resort. The fun part about this is I created a specific mood boards for different elements. This one is. Capturing a moment in time. We wanted to capture action. We wanted to capture a feeling through those moments. The next mood board for that same shoe was really trying to convey family moments within the family that are really representative of that love and that connects all of these mood boards should be building to one idea. This next one is exclusively about treatments and textures. While the content themselves might not be what we're going to show on this photo shoot. I want the textures to recaptured. I want these rich cool tones to feel really warm. So this one is an illustration mood board that we worked on for holidays of last year for organic social. The idea behind it is that we're going to create these kind of postcards celebrating different holidays in the winter season. And we wanted each of them to have a slightly different style of illustration and lettering. We wanted it to feel like vintage lettering, but in a modern, clean graphic way. And the illustrations themselves are also very minimal. A little bit whimsical as well. And here you can see the finished product. I was very proud of them actually did most of the illustration myself. And then my coworker did the lettering. Some of my favorite mood boards I've ever created was when I worked for the Oscars. They are really playful artistic. So I'm going to show you some of the mood boards for the 80th Oscars, which was a long time ago. Now, we were really leaning into the idea of infinity. This was 88 Oscars. So if you took the a and put it sideways, you have an infinity symbol. Also, the academy has very clear triangular iconography. The academy logo is a triangle. So this page specifically is trying to convey the overlap between the circles for the infinity eight and a triangle shape. And how does infinity show for that mood? Here's a mood board specifically for pattern inspiration along the same lines of infinity and triangular shapes. This one was all about taking infinity and making it kinetic. So we have a mixture here of everything. Here is photography, but it also has things overlaid on as graphic treatments. It has typography, has illustrative elements, graphic elements on top automate this kinetic motion clear, this one was taking a different direction for infinity and he was leaning into repetition. I also made the color palette here very muted. Everything is black and white, and this became something we explored two, should everything be black and white except for the Oscar statue in this campaign? And how does repetition play into infinity? And this one was another way in which was more about reflection. So the Oscar statue itself, of course, is a super reflective surface. So what are we going to show and how are we going to show that in relationship to repetition? Or how are we going to show that in relationship to infinity, you can think of an infinity room. Are those infinity mirrors as well? And then we had a mood board for what the decor could look like. We also very much are leaning into black, white, and gold here, because those would be the colors of the Oscars and black and white affair with gold. To represent the Oscar statue. We really wanted to show a retro elevated space. We wanted really high-level black and white decor everywhere with gold accents. And we wanted it to feel a little bit gaudy as well. So while that was the event space, this is more of the table scape, so it's still complimenting everything we showed on the previous page, but it had its own mood board. 6. Class Project: Now that we've talked about the why, now that I've shown you the resources that I use, the sources that I use. And now that I've told you all the ingredients to make the perfect moodboard. It's time for you to make one. I'm actually going to give you two prompts, two options for the mood board that you're gonna make depending on what feels right for you. Prompt a is to create a mood board based on your dream kitchen, bedroom, or living room. This one is very much going to be an interior design style mood board. And it's also going to have a little bit of that manifestation that we were talking about at the very beginning. What does that space look like to you? If it's a kitchen, I want to see what the fixtures look like. I want to see your color palette. I want to see the textures of the walls, of the floors, maybe the ceilings. Prompt B is to create a mood board for a client who is opening a cupcake business and Palm Springs and needs help building the brand. I'm hoping that those specifics are broad enough that you can do whatever you want. But it also can kinda give you a direction for what colors you see coming to life, for what style you see coming to life? Is it going to flip the script on what a cupcake business should look like? Or is it going to be very much in line with what you think of when you see a cupcake business in Palm Springs. This one is leaning more into the climate realm. The other one is more for you and your style. So think about that as well. So the final piece should be uploaded as a JPEG. Usually I do 1920 by 1080, that's a standard size, just like this whole class. The last thing I wanted to say as we give you this prompt is, how do I make my mood boards? I usually make them in either InDesign or in Google Slides. It's really up to you. I think Google slide is harder for design layout. Indesign is much cleaner and much simpler and much better to use for a designer, but feel free to use whatever you have available to you. 7. The End: Okay, Now it's time to say goodbye. I'm gonna miss you all. I hope you learned everything you could ever want to know about a mood board. I hope you learned more than you wanted to know, and I'm really excited to see what you guys come up with. Thank you so much for watching and I can't wait to see your mood boards.