July Inspiration: Lake Life
Managing a full time job in addition to being a mom of one year old twins means that I’m rarely able to carve out time to relax and reboot my creative juices. Luckily, July is a month that I always look forward to. After a long and busy winter it’s finally time for vacation. It's a week spent in Maine at our family lake house; and the perfect opportunity for resetting my creative mind. It’s somewhere I’ve gone to every summer since I can remember. And I’m fortunate enough that my children will get to spend their summers there as well, creating their own memories and learning to love it just as much as I do.
For me its a place of calm, comfort, family and fresh air. It’s one of the few places where I can clear my mind and remove myself from my day to day routine to take in the environment surrounding me. This year, I decided that I would use this creative reboot as inspiration for my first blog post and what I hope to be the start of a regular mood board issue of visual inspiration.
So, it seems only fitting that my first post should be about mood boards.
What are mood boards?
Simply put, mood boards are curated collections of visual inspiration used to inform visual tone and aesthetic decisions throughout the course of a project.
Validate design decisions by making the subjective, objective.
Mood boards have become an important phase of my creative process. They serve as part of my design research. I use them for nearly every large project that I work on, whether it be for a website redesign or establishing a new brand essence or look and feel. Although mood boards can come in many shapes and sizes, I prefer to structure mine as a collage. Perhaps the most casual in form, it allows me to think broadly, fluidly and rapidly. In this format I can remove my own biases. I let the mood board evolve on its own and try my best not to force its course. My only criteria is that every image/piece of inspiration included must tie back to the established messaging or brand positioning. When it’s complete, the mood board gives me the base I need to make insightful and validated recommendations as I move into the next phase of design; usually style tiles or preliminary brand toolkits depending on the type of project. I use the mood board to identify common themes in visual elements like photography or illustration styles, type treatments, colors, textures, patterns, etc.
They're called mood boards for a reason.
Mood boards not only set a visual tone, they naturally evoke an emotion. How does this collection of “things” make me feel? For instance in my "Lake Life" mood board above, some of the attributes that support the selected visual inspiration include calm, casual, relaxed, inviting, natural, fresh and carefree. These are all things I feel during my visits to the lake. Evoking an emotion is perhaps the most important result of a mood board exploration because it's something that can’t quite be articulated by words alone.
Get everyone on the same page.
You've heard it before. Your client says that they want their new website to feel modern and clean. The problem is, what’s visually “modern and clean” to them may not be the same for you. Think of mood boards as visual prototyping. You can create them fairly quickly and get their feedback before too much time is invested going down a misguided path. Getting your client involved early and often puts you both in alignment, invites them into the creative process and allows them to feel more ownership in the end result.
Creativity by nature is very subjective. Starting your creative process with mood boards allows you to validate your design decisions based on strategy, get incremental buy in from your client more frequently and identify visual cues that evoke an emotion in order to create a stronger connection with your audience.