How to Make a Mood Board

Visualizing your design doesn’t have to be hard. Pull those dusty Pinterest boards out of the attic.

Mood boards are a designer’s best friend, and they can be yours too. They’re perfect for encapsulating the vision of a design and a great first step to designing one. Rather than keeping your hundreds of photos saved in your Pinterest boards, we’re here to help you narrow your selections into a concentrated mood board. Follow this guide for a complete walk through.

Let’s start with a few rules of thumb. When it comes to making an initial ideation mood board, you want to find images that reflect the vision you have for your space. Let’s start our mood board by finding 6 images total for this example. Follow the Rule of 2: Find 2 images that feature an object, 2 images that feature a place or landscape, and 2 images that feature a texture. This will create a balanced canvas for your culinary design ideas. If you’re still struggling to find inspiration, start by drawing up an ideation bubble. This can help get the creative juices flowing!

When selecting these images, make sure they have meaning behind them. Are you using textured wallpaper that you plan to incorporate? Is the location image you’re using related to the geographical location of your design space? Does the object in the image match a decorative item you want to use? Try not to pick something just because it is pleasing to the eye. We want your mood board to be specific to your project.

For this example, I am designing a mood board for a powder room. I would like dramatic wallpaper with reeded elements for added texture, and I want to incorporate jewel tones.

As you’re looking through your plethora of images, don’t disregard the color temperature and color balance of each picture. To keep a cohesive mood board, our images must have coordinating colors and color temperature. A canvas with mixed temperatures may appear muddy or visually confusing. You’ll notice the mood board for this example features colors with warm undertones. Not sure what an undertone is? We explain it in our previous blog post, “What is an Undertone?”.

For this example, the images are laid out in a grid pattern. Our layout requires careful placement of our images so that they don’t appear imbalanced. To prevent this from happening, we’re going to adjust our images accordingly: if possible, try not to place both images in each category directly next to each other. For example, we don’t want to place both of our “object” images next to each other. The same goes for our “texture” images, and vice versa. Remember to factor in color balance as you’re playing Jenga with your inspiration images.

Make whatever remaining touches you’d like and voila! You’ve got a nearly perfect mood board of your space! Having a mood board on hand can help communicate your ideas more effectively with others. We also think they’re pretty fun to make.