Bringing your client’s ideas to life can ease their anxiety and give them the confidence they need to move forward with a design strategy! What mood boards aren’t. Using mood boards to present your vision of stakeholder requests is a great way to present their ideas back to them, visually, and to make sure you are all on the same page with design concepts. Many times these wishes are communicated verbally and provide very little actual direction for a designer to build on. Your client may have many stakeholders weighing in with their own unique desires for the website design. Show them to your client and help them decide which represents their organization best! They bring life to the client’s vision. Set up a mood board for each, then elaborate. On the other hand, you may have an image or phrase you are using for inspiration, that doesn’t fit the same theme, but which you also wouldn’t mind exploring. You may have a collection of fonts and colors in mind that fit a particular theme. You can create as many boards as you’d like, to organize your different concepts. Janie Kliever, a graphic designer and writer, points out that mood boards help you gather ideas and inspiration for a project. Why we recommend starting every design project with a mood board: They organize your inspirations. Your clients want to stand apart from their competitors and giving them a custom, personalized mood board can demonstrate your commitment to helping them achieve this. Create something new and fresh each time.

Don’t reuse or re-purpose old mood boards even if they are for the same client. A mood board should be unique to every project. They are an introduction to your proposed design style. They are more than just a means to pitch design ideas. Web design agency, ProtoFuse, explains that mood boards are ideal for setting branding guidelines, communication styles, and personality. Ultimately, using mood boards can save time and money, while also making both you and the client more prepared. This may otherwise not be accomplished until it’s too late in the design process. Presenting a mood board, or two, can give your client a more accurate picture of how their final website will look and feel. You can make your mood board physical or digital, either way, using a mood board is ideal for communicating a project’s visual direction and is more effective than a verbal discussion. Mood boards help designers and stakeholders visualize where a project is going, before it even starts. They are a way to collect and organize the thoughts and ideas for a design project from color palettes to typography. Mood boards are to designers what outlines are to writers.

Mood board website