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Why create a mood board for your business brand?
Why create a mood board for your business brand?
May 12, 2011
Mood boards, vision boards, design boards – call them what you will, they’re not a new concept. Used by graphic designers, coaches and interior designers the world over, mood boards help you to clarify what’s important to you, visualise what it is you’re striving for and help you to communicate.
We love mood boards at Flourish. And in my branding workshops, I lead small business owners through creating their own mood boards for their businesses.
I love mood boards because they help us understand our client, their objectives and how they’d like their brand to feel. It’s so important to us that we create a brand identity for a client that feels right as well as looks great and mood boards really unlock the gap between what a client says they want (or even thinks they want) and what they actually want.
They also help both us and the client gain a lot of clarity around their business – you can almost hear the penny drop or the light bulb ping as we work through the session and things start to emerge. I really love the way these sessions enrich our creativity and enable us to deliver a very creative and appropriate brand identity for our client.
Intangible businesses, such as management consultancies and services, are very difficult to draw. At times like this, you need some creative inspiration if we’re to avoid trudging down the well-worn stock photography path. Mood boards really spark our creativity and help us enrich the end result.
Finally, everyone that has taken part in these sessions loves the fact that they’ve been a part of the process. I can’t tell you the number of times people have said afterwards “I thought you’d gone mad, charging me for cutting and sticking but that was the most powerful, creative thing I’ve done in a long while”.
It’s not just the mood board itself that helps, it’s the whole process. It’s not just about what goes on the board, it’s about what doesn’t make the final cut too. It’s the clarification at the beginning that comes to life as we work through the session. It’s the emotive responses we have to images, colours and words. It’s the passionate discussion, the lively debate and the understanding. What’s not to like?
Fiona Humberstone, Flourish design & marketing
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Comments
Brilliantly put!
Love your wording here Fiona, "Mood boards really spark our creativity and help us enrich the end result."
I find moodboards to be invaluable; they're easy to ignore and skip, but when you discover your client's hot buttons, man, it's so worth it.
They are a perfect way to move beyond the creative rut that threatens to set in at the beginning of a new project, freeing you from your last best and moodboards even help the client distingiush themselves above their competition instead of continually insisting that what they really want is "something just like this"...
If done well, it the most rewarding bit of hard work in a project which causes the rest of the project simply breeze by.
And if there is a better way to instill confidence in your client whilst showing them that you actually care about understanding their priorities, their company and helping them to be clear about it themselves, then let me know.
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