Creating Your Brand Identity: Why Brand Mood Boards Are Essential to the Design Process
Creating a brand mood board is an important step in the design process for building a brand identity for your small business. Recently, I had a design inquiry from a prospective client. She asked me, “How is the logo design process with your clients? Does it normally go smoothly?”
I replied, “Before starting the logo design, I have a 30-minute clarity session with my clients over Zoom, and we create a brand visual mood board to ensure we are heading in the same visual direction. My clients are usually very pleased with how smoothly the logo design process goes.”
Sometimes it can be difficult to express our creative concepts with words alone. Wouldn’t you agree? A mood board is a perfect way to convey our visual ideas and preferences to ensure we are both heading in a similar direction.
Before we create your logo and brand identity, we work together to complete your brand mood board. It’s helpful to start by collecting inspiration for your brand from photos, graphics, and typography that resonates with you in some way. These items can then be compiled into a simple and cohesive inspiration board on Pinterest. This is an essential step for building a successful brand identity design.
Gathering sources of inspiration is not done alone — you collaborate with your designer and collect images that you believe reflect your brand. This is a fun part of the design process. But, why do we do this?
Sometimes, trying to express a mood or feeling can feel like trying to describe a vague concept in concrete terms; it can be challenging to put into words. A brand mood board can help us see the patterns in our visual ideas. Your designer can use these patterns to inform the direction of the project.
For example, I had a design client who wanted a simple and natural brand style. We both collected images that we thought reflected the brand, but when we compared them, we realized that the brand style l had in mind was different from the brand style she had in mind. By catching this difference up front, we were able to reconcile the differences and create something that worked for both of us. By getting aligned early in the process, we both saved a lot of time and energy.
In addition, every client has a different niche and purpose. Sometimes, people find that communicating visually makes it easier to express how our brand is unique rather than relying on verbal communication. A brand mood board helps both the designer and the client to focus their energies in a particular direction.
A mood board also provides your designer with a starting point and a springboard for ideas. Without this starting point, it feels like throwing darts at a dartboard while blindfolded. It also helps to keep your designer focused on your style throughout the entire project. When in doubt, it’s always helpful to go back to the mood board.
In this post, I’ll give you a behind-the-scenes look at my process for creating a simple and well-organized brand mood board. Once you’re familiar with this part of the design process, you’ll feel more comfortable collaborating with a designer and preparing the visual images for your mood board.
What is a brand mood board?
A brand mood board is a collage of visual ideas and concepts that helps establish the creative direction for a project. It’s an assortment of ideas, patterns, textures, fonts, and images that you feel accurately reflects your brand’s personality, style, and message.
How do you create a brand mood board?
When making your brand mood board, there are some key points to remember:
• Keep your brand voice and ideal clients in mind.
Ultimately, you want to connect with your ideal clients, so keep them in mind throughout the process. If you need help defining your audience, download my Brand Clarity Workbook to help determine your target audience and brand message.
• Search for more than just pretty pictures.
With so many different patterns, shapes, textures, fonts, and images available, starting the search can seem overwhelming. At the beginning of the process, try not to overthink it. Later, you’ll get to look back and see which themes keep repeating.
• Refine and edit your selections.
After you’ve chosen at least 50 images, go back through them and see which ones really jump out at you and which truly represent the entire feel of your brand.
Following is a step-by-step process to create your visual mood board:
Step 1: Start with three to five keywords
When you think of your brand, what words come to mind most frequently? These words reflect your brand and are part of your brand personality.
For example, words that describe a nutritionist in the health and wellness industry could include healthy lifestyle, clean, natural, and trust. After you’ve created your own list, look back at your words and pick three to five words of them that you feel truly reflect your brand.
What if you’re not sure which keywords to pick? You could use my Brand Clarity Workbook or a brand questionnaire. These workbooks and questionnaires will ask questions about your brand. Your answers will guide your branding strategy, and you will begin to see certain words used repeatedly. These are the keywords that you should focus on.
Step 2: Pin to your Pinterest board
Pinterest is a great application for creating your brand mood board. Start by creating a new board and label it "[name of project] ideas". If you don’t want to show this board to anyone, you can make it private. Now think back to those three to five keywords you just picked and try to locate images that reflect those words. There are no rules as to how many images you should curate. Just remember, it’s not always visuals from your industry; it’s color swatches, textures (refined, rough, etc.), and patterns (organic, stripes, polka dots, etc.) as well.
A quick note about the items you pin: always keep your pinning purposeful. While going through this process, try to view it through the lens of your own brand and the lens of your ideal client. For each item, ask yourself the following questions:
How does this image make me feel?
How would it make my audience feel?
Is that the message I want to send?
If you’re not using Pinterest yet, you can sign up for a free account here.
Once your private mood board is set up, start adding items to your board. A great way to get started is to search for the three to five keywords that describe your brand.
Create a Pinterest board and pin 30-50 images. To see how it’s done, I created a sample Pinterest board for Modern health and wellness.
Step 3: Pick your top 10-15 favorite images
Now for the hard part. It’s time to go back over those images and pick your favorites. Remember, it’s not just what you love, it’s what you feel best reflects your brand and resonates with your ideal client. Choose 10-15 images by right-clicking on the ones that align best and save the images to your desktop.
Step 4: Start creating your brand mood board
You can create a mood board in many different programs including popular programs, such as Canva and Photoshop. I use Adobe InDesign to create a brand mood board, but you could even use free software like Canva.
Step 5: Select your color palette
Now that you have a nice, organized mood board, it’s time to pick out some colors. Go back through your images and look for color themes that repeat.
Choose no more than two to three colors for your color palette. These are going to be your main colors so they should be strong. Also, choose one or two colors from a more neutral color palette to serve as accent colors. To achieve a simple and clean look for your brand, I suggest keeping the brand colors to a minimum.
Once you have your brand mood board and color palette, you should have a good understanding of your visual brand style. With this foundation, you can now create your brand essentials: your logos, brand identity, and brand style guide. As a designer, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this process to lay the groundwork for building your brand visuals. Once you’ve done the preliminary work for your brand identity, your designer will be able to create visuals that accurately reflect your brand.
Conclusion
I hope this article helps explain why creating a brand mood board is an important part of the design process for your brand identity. Now that you are more familiar with brand mood boards and how to create them, you can start collecting your own images on Pinterest.
If you’re ready to build a brand identity that truly represents your business, and you’d like to work with a designer, let’s talk to see if we’re a good fit for each other. Please schedule a discovery call or contact me for more information.
Photo reference from Pinterest & Unsplash, Love + Made