I'm Alex, owner and designer at Alex Collier Design. My mission is to help you uplevel your businesses through gorgeous and strategic web design.
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I remember sitting on my bedroom floor in high school rifling through the latest issues of Teen People and Seventeen, searching for the most inspirational words and images to cut out. Gluestick in hand, I repositioned the different cutouts on a piece of computer paper until they looked just right. I slipped the finished collage into my binder cover and walked into Geometry class feeling pretty cool that my binder perfectly matched my personality.
The entrepreneur’s version of the magazine collage? The mood board!
The mood board is a key part of the branding experience. It captures the look and feel of your brand, which informs the rest of the branding process, including your fonts, colors, logo, and website! All of my clients and I collaborate to create a mood board that communicates their brand personality in a visual way.
Because I know that creating a mood board can be overwhelming, I have my clients start by creating a Pinterest board with 30-40 images for inspiration. I then curate images from that board and supplement where needed with other images, patterns, and textures to create a mood board that perfectly captures my client’s brand.
There are two important things to remember about mood boards:
When you’re excited about a rebrand, it can be tempting to jump on over to Pinterest and start pinning alllll the ideas. Avoid this trap at all costs! You’ll end up with hundreds of pretty—but unrelated—images with no strategy behind them.
Second, consider that your mood board is not the end result. There’s no point in stressing out about the exact colors, images, and layout of your mood board—no one will ever see it besides you! The mood board serves as the inspiration for your brand. The look and feel it evokes serve as your guide in selecting brand elements like colors, fonts, and logos. The mood board is a great example of a time you can embrace the motto “done is better than perfect.”
Here are my best tips for creating a mood board for your brand:
Here are some examples of mood boards I’ve created recently to give you an idea of how these tips work in action:
Do you have a mood board for your brand?
Site design by Alex Collier Design | Brand Images by Paty Araujo Photography