How to Workshop Your Taste: Creating Effective Mood Boards for Branding

Making Refined Visual Moodboards: Speed up Your Process Working
with Designers and Arists by Knowing What You Want & How to Find it

Transcript

Hi friends, this is Jules and welcome to The Pool Party. Recently this month we've been talking about effective branding and creating artwork for DIY artists, entrepreneurs, and Folks who are just trying to put themselves out online. In the most recent episode, we talked about websites for sourcing inspiration.

And if you haven't listened to that episode yet, go ahead and give it a listen. Ideally, you know all the design and art websites now where you can find good inspiration that is highly curated. I mentioned 3 for collecting inspiration and making an online profile to collate your inspiration. inspiration and resources.

And this is especially important if you are someone who is building your own brand, trying to work with designers. You need to have your sources of inspiration online and easy to connect to. I mentioned three websites, Arena, Pinterest, and Behance. Now let's say that you use Pinterest, I use Pinterest, and now you want to create more Succinct, collected mood boards that will help you drive your initial brand details.

And I also talked about this in an earlier podcast on the tenets of creating a foundational brand that consists of succinct color, font, and image inspiration. Today on this podcast episode, we're going to talk about structuring a mood board to work with designers to build your own brand. And if you're a designer, this is also a really succinct process that I use to cultivate a new brand, whether that's for startups, corporations, or for my own personal projects.

So This is going to be an audio workshop today, and we're going to use PowerPoint to create this mood board for your brand. Ideally, you already know what your brand values are. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, go ahead and give it a listen. We're just going to talk about structuring your mood board today and what it should consist of.

So if you're ready, if you've listened to the other episodes, let's go ahead and dive in. When you create your brand mood board, there are a few things you want to make it comprised of, and I'll go ahead and give you a few of the pages that you need. You're going to need a page for colors, fonts, and images.

Eventually, you'll create a table of contents and an intro, There are three essential pages that we're actually going to put images onto for your mood boards. And those are the colors, fonts, and images pages. Each mood board should have a single page for colors, fonts, and images. And Since we already talked about brand values, I want you to go ahead and find what your brand values are.

You may have written them down already. Let's say, for example, that you are an artist and you're trying to create an artist persona. What you value is creativity, community, and Let's say that the other one is Being different. Being different might have to be honed in on, and let's actually talk about how you're different.

If you're a visual artist, and you like to draw things by hand, you might want to write handwritten, or have some sort of Handmade component to your values. You can decide what your words are, but essentially what you're going to want to do is write these values at the top of each of your pages for colors, fonts, and images.

Let's talk about where to make your mood boards. So for this, we're talking about making a presentation, and you can make a PowerPoint on Qno, you can use slides I personally as a designer use InDesign and I like InDesign because you can size all the images to fit nicely and layout well. If you're not a designer, InDesign is definitely going to be a bit clunkier than what your needs are.

So I would say open up Slides or a PowerPoint. So now, at this point, you should have three pages that consist of colors, fonts, and images. And then, at the top of each page, you're going to have your brand values. This is important because we're going to start with each page now, and you want to reflect on what your brand values are, you want to have your name at the top, and we're going to spend about 15 minutes each mood board.

Collecting images and putting them in to get a sense for what your brand is going to look like. So we're going to start with colors. And if you remember from the branding episode, you want to choose as few colors as possible to translate the message of your brand. So let's say if you're trying to go for something a bit more friendly and artistic, you like the colors blue and red.

So for your mood board, you're going to want to choose six images that reflect these colors together. Now your images can be a variety of images. Print products, websites, and color combinations in nature, but I would say think about where your colors are actually going to be used and what your first deliverable is going to be.

I think a website might be a lot to think about when you're first starting out. A lot of the inspiration images you might find might actually be print products, and I think Designspiration is a great place to look for colors for your mood board. Designspiration is a website where you can go on and find a lot of print products books.

hats, canvas, tote bags, et cetera that are nicely designed and take a look on there and then find your colors in action. There's even a great section of the website where you can put in the colors that you want. And from there I want you to spend just 15 minutes selecting six images that represent your colors.

From there, you're going to pop them into your mood board and there is your color mood board. Now, it's important after you've put all of your images in to make sure that the images are not overlapping. We want to get a sense for the color of How the color looks and I want you to ask yourself really genuinely if the colors Have any variations if they make sense to you if you like them together I think a lot of times we have ideas in our head that you know This is how it should look but I need you to try to at least get the mood board to look how it looks in your head.

And if you can't do that by just selecting six images, it means you're not being specific enough or your inspiration sources are not high quality enough. So you just want to choose six images. And if you're not getting the idea if it's not reflecting your name and your brand values correctly, just through six images spend another 15 minutes on this mood board.

Up next, we're going to move on to fonts. Fonts. You can stay on Design Inspiration, you can go on Behance, Pinterest, these are all inspiration websites I mentioned in the Design Inspiration website podcast. And we're going to do the same thing with our fonts. It's about 15 minutes looking at the type that you see on on the screen.

Different assets and print materials. And I want you to try and be selective here. We don't want to. wide barrage of different fonts. Selecting a lot of different types of fonts is something that you can do on your Pinterest, but for your mood board, for your brand, this is when you're wanting to select.

You're going to choose six images now that represent Very specifically, the direction your brand is going to go and you want to choose just one type of font, whether that's a serif style or a non serif. Try to stay within the family of fonts, so if you know the name of the font that you're looking for, look that up and find examples of it used in the wild on sites like Designspiration or Behance.

Again, we only want to spend 15 minutes on this, and then once that 15 minute timer is done, take a look at your mood board and be real with yourself. Did you accidentally include another font in your mood board that is outside of what you actually want to use? How is the spacing on the lettering? Is it tight?

Is it wide? Narrow down what type of spacing you want to use. And again, you should be able to translate. The idea and the vision just through six images So if there's a lot of room for questions as you look at your fonts and it's not clear Like you could give that to a designer and it wouldn't be clear what direction you want to go in Spend another 15 minutes on this again I know this seems like hard work, but what we're trying to do is get you to make decisions Because it's going to save you and your designer time whether you are the designer or you're working with the clients or You are the client.

You need to make decisions and No matter how much money you spend working with the designer No one is really going to be able to make these decisions for you because you need to be able to feel good about them And if you need help Understanding why and how to choose certain fonts go ahead and listen to that big branding episode again That's the first branding episode in this series. Moving on, we want to create a mood board for images.

And for images, let's say, this is really going to depend on what type of art you create, what kind of product you create but the qualities I would focus on are, do you want illustrations? Do you want product photography? I would just choose one lane, choose a lane, and then choose six images to represent those types of images you want.

And again, in the branding episode, I told you that if you choose photography, you could go for color or you could go for black and white. And there are a variety of websites where you can choose stock images, stock photography. And what you want to do is try to get a sense for at least harmony in these images.

And again, we're just choosing six images here. So if it looks all over the place, if it looks like All of these images could come from different websites in a bad way you need to refine your mood board. Again, we should just be spending 15 minutes on images, and you can go back to it, but the whole point of this exercise is to spend 15 minutes on color, mood board, 15 minutes on fonts, and 15 minutes on images.

On each page, you should have six images. inspiration photos, you need to have your brand values at the top and your name. And from here, you've spent just about 45 minutes if you followed the prompt, and now you have three pages of a very succinct brand mood board for your colors, fonts, and images. If you go over time, that's a lot.

Okay, but the whole idea here is to try to get you to spend less time making these decisions. I would say finish your mood boards overall first, and then go back to refine them. Try to spend only 15 minutes on each mood board at a time, and if you find that your images are just not really translating what you want, go back onto the inspiration websites and find better images because, You don't need more in order to get your message across.

You need, if anything, higher quality selection, more refined taste and to make a decision. Sometimes people think that more is better, but it's not, it's just more noise and it becomes confusing and it makes you look amateur. All right. So that was a really quick exercise on how to develop your mood boards.

And again, this is going to be the starter. presentation to where you can include your logos your colors and then also your brand values. You want to collate all of the resources I discuss that you need for your brand within this presentation. And if anything, this is like your personal little journal where you're going to keep track of your changes over time.

And I would say, you know, make make a, make a, a mood board presentation that you really like and love, and then revisit it once every three months. Don't change it too much, but the whole point of this is to track your changes over time and to see how your style gets refined. Even if you only have 30 minutes to spend on this exercise, spend 10 minutes looking for color response and images.

Set a timer, keep yourself accountable, but it'll get you closer to knowing what your branding is without having to involve another person, without having to hop on a call with the designer, and it'll be a big time saver for everyone involved later on once you start working with a larger team.

If you want to take this exercise even further, you can do this exercise three times over three separate days. So let's say, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, you split up your branding exercise. You spend 30 minutes the first day 30 minutes the next, and then 30 minutes on the last day. I recommend separating, creating your mood board over the course of a few days at times because what it does is it helps your brain to rest, you move on, you take care of the other things that you need to do and at the end of the day you've spent time away to work on the process in the background in your subconscious and I think that helps me as a designer at least make decisions.

If you've done this exercise, then at this point, you could involve a designer and ask for help in whittling down your mood boards, or you could at least tell them what you want to create, and then through giving them your mood boards, they'll have a better sense of where to go, and then you can allow, and then you can allow a professional person to help whittle down your decisions, and it'll make your branding even 📍 stronger.

Alright, so that was our episode on doing a mood boarding workshop, and I want you to go through this episode, take it nice and slowly, pause during each section for colors, fonts, and images, and take it easy. I just want you to start out with these three pages for mood boards when you're starting out. As you learn what you need to create, whether that's a website you need a book cover, a resume, you can even create a mood board page for these specific examples.

If you need t shirts or let's say you're trying to create merch for your band you can create a mood board for each of these assets as well. But overall, we just want to nail down colors, fonts, and images. That's all you really need for a good branding package at first. And then you can find examples of each asset that you want to create later.

But before you try to create artwork and just slap it on all of these different items, find some good design out there and develop a good taste for what works. And then that way, we can also reduce the amount of Products and printed tote bags out there that get created that are just boring and My hope is to see less Boring assets and branding out in the world I want to see stuff that like actually speaks to people actually speaks to your audience and reduces waste We don't need more.

We need higher quality if you get what I'm saying. So this has been The mood boarding episode of The Pool Party. My name is Jules, and if you need more help with your mood boards and your branding, go ahead and listen to the other episodes in this series. They'll definitely help you. And, in the very least, if you need more help, you can go to my website.

It's juliaespero.me. That's J U L I A E S P E R O dot com. That's a period, me, juliaspero.me. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Pool Party, and I'll talk to you next time.