How to make a mood board for a brand or project: a creative director’s method

The brief, in one sentence, before a single image is saved: what is being made, who it is for, and the one quality it must have. “A bakery for a neighbourhood that never had one, handmade without looking rustic.” It sits at the top of the board through every version.

A brief has to be able to reject images. If everything you like passes, the sentence is too soft; add the word that would cut half of them.

About twenty images to five words, and the words are single words: “warm”, “precise”, “unhurried”, set in the typeface from the type row so they do double duty. Anything longer goes into the talking notes.

A board is read in one glance; words are read one at a time. A paragraph turns the board into a document, and the room starts reading instead of looking. The brief is the only sentence allowed, and it sits above the images, not among them.

As one flat image, one direction, in a fixed order. Read the brief aloud. Show the whole board full screen and say nothing for ten seconds; the first reaction is the one worth hearing. Then walk the rows in table order, colour and type before photography, because the small decisions are argued about least.

If the brief honestly allows two directions, show two, each with its own name, and never a third. Close with a question that takes yes or no, and send the same image afterwards with the version in the file name.

Because it was assembled by taste instead of by the brief. Every image is beautiful, everyone likes it, and nobody can say afterwards which typeface won, which colour carries the weight, or whether the photography has people in it.

The test takes a minute: could a designer who was not in the room start tomorrow from the board alone? If not, add the missing row, then remove anything that is there only because it is nice. A mood board is judged by what it settles, not by how it looks on a wall.

A new board for every version, and never edit a presented version in place. “Bakery v1” stays as it was shown; the changes from the meeting go onto “Bakery v2”, and the exported image carries the version and the date. More than five versions means the brief is moving, and the fix is in the sentence, not the images.

On Pinterest this means separate boards rather than sections, because outside Pinterest a section has no address of its own: an embed or a wallpaper reads the whole parent board.

Because everyone already has it, it saves from any website in one click, and it shows a board as a grid, which is the shape a mood board ends up in anyway. A public board adds two things: anyone with the link can look without an account, so the client and the team see what you see, and other software can read it, so the board can leave Pinterest.