Above: Collaborative moodboard for Leveled Up Learning

What is a moodboard?

Moodboards are visual brainstorming and idea-organizing tools. They’re like a collage: Images from lots of sources that inspire and have characteristics of something we want in our final product. Visual designer Ronald Viernes of Blink says, “What a moodboard isn't is a final direction for the look of a project.”

Instead, moodboards are “an early step in the process” that aim to communicate emotions, styles, colors, vibes, and key words.

Often Pinterest is the tool of choice, though anything works; the key is to start collaging ideas that will become inspiration for the design!

Joseph Foley of Creative Bloq recommends going offline as well, finding images from other sources and taking photos - there’s no need to be limited to only online sources.

Why should I make a moodboard before designing a logo?

I always build moodboards before a logo or brand design project because a good moodboard can become the foundation for an original and meaningful logo, while still allowing me to get visual inspiration from diverse sources, allowing those sources — often unexpected ones! — to cross-pollinate and mix. A moodboard can be like a delicious soup made from scratch — Put in a little bit of this, a little of that, and stir until something compelling starts to form.

They’re also great tools for building a shared vision with clients. Clients and designers can build collaborative moodboards. See this article on how to build a group moodboard on Pinterest.

Designers can also use moodboards as part of presentations, to help the client see what they’re thinking. This can help avoid problems later on by making sure everyone is on the same page.

How to make a better moodboard

When making a moodboard, some might find it tempting to target exactly what the brand or business is about on its surface. For example, searching for “sneakers” or “sneaker brand logo” to represent a sneaker brand.

This can be a place to start getting the wheels turning, but ultimately it’s important to go beyond this. Here’s why.

Brands thrive for two reasons:

They are original.
They are about something bigger and more meaningful than just what they sell.

We don’t want to copy, or even be subconsciously influenced to copy, our competitors. We want to be different!

We don’t want our brand to be superficial, either. The best brands are about big ideas.

Nike doesn’t just sell “sneakers” — they use their brand to sell excellence, boldness, toughness, and athleticism. Even if you have a very small business, you too can make your business about a big idea.

If we want to build a brand around big ideas and originality (and we do!) we should build our moodboard the same way. Build your moodboard around ideas that resonate with you, and then pairing images to those ideas, rather than the other way around.

I like to include a bit of literal imagery, if it has something to contribute— but I avoid including competitor logos in the moodboard. I don’t want to be influenced or constrained by them.

When I built a moodboard for the locally-owned, historically rooted bakery Upper Crust, I went back to the roots by finding vintage signage from bakeries from the time of the business’s founding. I paired these with the textures of bread, pastries and the look of chalkboard menus, worn natural wood and other natural, authentic materials.

To capture the Parisian roots, I explored photos of the streets of Paris and referenced the exteriors of the best and oldest Parisian bakeries.

Some ideas to spark your moodboard journey:

Get authentic. Drill down to the roots of what your brand is about.
Get historical. Include materials from time periods that your brand was founded, or when you’d like people to feel it was founded.
Get material. Include textures, shapes and colors of the product. Try close-ups, diagrams, color and black and white. Explore different ways to see the product. What is its essence?
Get imaginative. Imagine the inner experience of using the product. What’s it really about?

Moodboard to logo case study

Gabe is the founder of Leveled Up Learning — and one of my first clients. Leveled Up Learning is a company all about facilitating learning experiences through gaming. Gabe and I built a collaborative moodboard to guide the development of Leveled Up Learning’s brand.

A great moodboard starts with my brand research, which I do together with clients. We’ll come up with a shared understanding of what the brand means, who is is for, and why it’s important to the end users. These can also become search keywords that help build the moodboard.

This is how we start digging deeper.

One tip is to look for images that relate to the inner experiences that users will have (or that we want them to have) with the brand. This is information I get from listening to my clients and sharing their passion for what they do!

As I built the moodboard for Leveled Up Learning, I asked myself—and my client:

What is important about gaming?

What makes learning through gaming special?

And how does Leveled Up facilitate that?

Gaming, of course, isn’t actually about game pieces, cards, or computer software or hardware, or any of that superficial stuff that makes the game possible. Instead, it’s about the emotional experiences that we have while we play. This is what actually drive us to want to play games - things like adventure, exploration, satisfaction, solving puzzles, and camaraderie and friendship.

From my client, who has a well of knowledge about the mechanics and philosophy of learning and teaching, I learned that gaming does something else that is also critical to learning: It allows us to take risks safely.

This balance makes “the adventure” so fun and rewarding. We love to take fun risks in a safe environment!

Now I had the basis to start building a “visual language.” I went to my moodboard and began searching for images that could express the fun of gaming and the flux between safety and adventure.

I thought about how this balance is there when you have an “adventure” or “journey” in a game - travelling across a new landscape (danger and exploration!) and making camp with your travelling companions to rest (friendship, safety, cameraderie!) This dynamic is especially present in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, which was a major component of Gabe’s work.

I began plugging terms into Pinterest and search engines.

And I noticed themes and colors emerging to represent these two elements:

“exploration” (think green wide open fields, treasure chests, green forests, blue rivers and skies, castles) and
“making camp” (red/yellow/orange glow of campfires, dark blue skies and shadows)

I pinned images that reflected these ideas thematically - forests, bands of travelers, campfires, paths, and more - which were also connected to gaming, adventuring, and/or youth.

That cross-pollination is important. For confident moodboard choices, Viernes recommends that “each image hits on multiple keywords.”

Building a moodboard that connects ideas, emotions and project needs

Every emerging brand has challenges for the designer. Some brands need to embrace characteristics that might seem like opposites, for example. And some companies do several very different things for different groups of people.

In Gabe’s work, he did a lot of tabletop gaming with students, and that was the bulk of what he did. But he also streamed games over Twitch under the same name and brand. And in the future, he was very open to doing more gamified learning with software.

He also sometimes worked with adults in a corporate team-building environment. And when he worked with students, they could be any age from elementary to high school.

How could we make the branding feel totally at home in all these worlds?

Moodboards can be ways to find imagery that bridges divides, so I used my moodboard searches to start looking for visuals that could work in all these places, without becoming too generic.

I was drawn to the “low poly” designs I was seeing come up in the moodboard, as a solution to bridging the digital/analog divide and keeping the visuals child-friendly yet not childish. Low poly refers to “low polygon,” a way of modeling 3D shapes so that they have fewer sides, and thus were easier to render in early video games.

The “low poly” style, in recent years, has taken off in a new direction with 3D modelled illustrations using simple shapes and appealing flat matte surfaces. It can now be seen in newer, more polished games too, like the beautiful Sea of Solitude (below).

The result looks kind of like a miniaturized world. It’s novel, friendly and appealing to both kids and adults.

It also resembles analog art forms like dioramas, papercraft, 3D printing and origami. Its appeal as a digital art form is that it doesn’t quite look digital or like real life- it’s like another world altogether.

It also looked like it could work well for Gabe’s budget. I wanted to give him a unique illustrative style, but like most small businesses, he didn’t have the funds for someone to create super-detailed collections of art. It needed to come together fast.

So, images of low-poly art which captured things we might see while adventuring – trees, rivers, paths, skies, campfires and more – became the thematic basis of the moodboard. After getting the client’s OK, these would later become central to the illustrative style developed for the brand.

Moodboard quick tips

Spending time thinking through a brand before we build the moodboard is important. Executed well, the moodboard can become a great foundation for the work that comes next.

For best results, avoid getting too literal with moodboards.
Explore lots of ideas, then start narrowing it down.
Mix literal imagery with bigger concepts, emotions and experiences.
Start with the big ideas, then look for visuals that reflect and represent them.

Need a hand developing your brand and logo? Book a free consult with me today!

How to Use Moodboards to Make a Better Logo (And what to avoid)