OnCreate Branding Design Course Workshop 2: Mood Board

O n C r e a t e

EU Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership in Higher Education

by grant agreement 2014-1-DE01-KA203-000706

“Workshop 3 – Logo-Signet Design”

Online course material

University of Lincoln // School of Media // Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal // M.A. CrossMedia // OnCreate Branding Design Course // Workshop 2: Moodboarding Page 1

OnCreateBranding Design CourseWorkshop 2: Mood BoardWritten by Constanze Langer (FH Potsdam), Björn Stockleben (HS Magdeburg) and James Field (University of Lincoln)


Moodboard


A moodboard is a collection which precedes the

main design process. Moodboards are about

visualizing moods and ideas which seem suitable

for the design challenge at hand. The collection

may contain cut-outs and photos and can be e.g.

be glued to cardboard paper. Flipcharts or

Pinboards work to. They can as well be compiled

virtually, e.g. using an online pinboard app like

padlet.com or google draw.

It is all about appearance and mood (colour

schemes, design elements, typographic directions

and tendencies). The moodboard turns abstract

terms into visual ideas. It is a great tool when you

want to convey initial ideas of the overall aesthetic

appearance of a design to a customer.

And – it is so much better than only verbalizing

your ideas. More often than not the customer does

not know himself what he actually does want (or

need).

A moodboard is not about concrete drafts, but

about a first impression and pointing the

direction where a product will develop to. The

appeal of a moodboard comes from the

compilation of various, often rough and

improvised, elements that depict a common

theme. You can as well copy design-elements and

potentially interesting details from other

websites/products/corporate designs. After all,

this part of the process is all about a first

inspiration for the customer, not the final design.

In a physical setting it does make sense to

juxtappose a couple of boards. Colour and overall

tonality play an important role. The customer may

decide spontaneously for a mood to follow.

Moodboards can come handy as an inspiring tool

for internal projects as well, especially when you

have not yet a basic idea where you wanna take

your design to.

Advantages:

• can be compiled with little effort and few tools

Tools:

• Paper, photos, scissors, pens, glue, etc.

• Software (e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator, online pin-

boards)

Web Links

• Flickr and Google expose countless examples

• A short How-To for Moodboards (in German)

• 5 reasons to design with mood boards

• Why Mood Boards Matter

• A Successful Precursor to Visual Prototyping

Customers are always happy when they can take moodboards home.

Mood Board

Moodboard Cross Media | Stephan Pohl


Beispiele für Moodboards auf Flickr

Sample Mood Board


When multiple people are tasked with contributing

to a mood board then the obvious approach is to

create a physical response (as illustrated on Page

2). Gathering and curating materials from a wide

range of media (both digital and not) is easy, quick

and fun.

If you are working as a team on mood boards,

there are a couple of different approaches you

could adopt. Firstly, each team member could go

away and work on their own version of the mood

board and report back to compare what the rest

of the team has also come up with. This approach

offers the advantages of allowing individual

creative freedom and differences in interpretation.

The opposing approach is to work on the board

simultaneously, constantly responding to what the

collective as a whole is contributing. This method is

great for bouncing ideas off each other as you go.

There is no correct or preferred approach, you as

a team (or the creative director/project manager)

decide what approach will work best for the task/

team of people.

There are digital alternatives to mood board

creation which do offer some advantages over the

physical approach. This is not to say that all mood

boards should be created digitally. But there are

certain situations where a digital mood board

offers unparalleled functionality, which are listed to

the right.

As well as the general online platforms tools

already discussed (such as Flickr) there are some

applications that feature more bespoke functions,

ideal for creating and sharing mood boards, which

are described on the following page.

Going Digital

• Remote working - when the team are not physi-

cally located nearby or are working from home.

Digital mood boards allow asynchronous colla-

boration for continued development. However,

certain tools allow synchronous (or real-time)

collaboration which can greatly improve the team

experience.

• Sharability - being able to share your mood

board with other contributors or even the client

themselves can be useful in order to obtain feed-

back.

• Portability & Availability - as with all content

stored on web servers, with digital mood boards

you will be able to access them (usually) from any

device with an internet connection which re-

moves potential issues such as transporting large/

bulky physical mood boards or them getting lost/

destroyed.

Creating Collaborative Mood boards

Collaborative ideation in the project „Sense My City“


Pinterest

Pinterest is a great way of sharing content with the

world. It is a long established and much loved web

application that has expanded beyond its origins

as a visual bookmark to help people collect project

ideas and interests.

Users can now open up their “boards” to other

contributors which allows asynchronous

collaboration of anything than be found on the

web or created on a computer/digital camera.

Although the layout and structure is fixed in that

each “pin” (which is an item of interest), occupies a

set amount of space, and the columns are fixed in

width, “pins” can be dragged around to establish

some sense of order.

Pinterest also has a browser extension which you

add to major web browsers to help speed up

adding content to your board you find online. It

also features a mobile app which can also help

“pinning” new content or uploading photos/audio

files from your device.

Padlet

If Pinterest’s column and grid based structure is too

rigid and formal for your liking, then Padlet is an

excellent alternative.

Much like Pinterest in that you can add snippets of

content from an digital source, Padlet extends this

concept to allow more freedom of the placement

of content making it more useful as a digital mood

board creator.

You can also work collaboratively, sharing your

“padlet’s” with other users (your team) and get

near real-time updates to additions/changes in its

content.

There is a browser extension which functions

in a similar way, if slightly less integrated, as the

Pinterest extension, but there is no mobile app

(yet). Padlet suggest you should have an identical

experience via a mobile web browser as that found

on a desktop one.

Google Docs / Draw

Although not strictly designed for mood board

creation, it is possible to use the real-time docu-

ments and drawing tools from Google to collabo-

rate synchronous when building-up a mood board.

The advantage these tools provide over the others

discussed is the ability to work and communicate

in real-time thanks to live updates and text/video

chat integrated into the web app.

As with the other tools there are browser extensi-

ons, mobile apps and desktop tools to allow you to

work productively and share content efficiently.

Digital Tools for Collaborative Mood Creation


Mood boards on pinterest. Related Pins often expose similar moods, making pinterest a great tool both for compiling mood boards and browsing a huge image collection.

Pinterest


A mood board compiling ... mood boards on padlet. link: http://de.padlet.com/arfank10_1/itl06lyw76oj

Padlet


3. Finally, decide which method of creation your team

wishes to adopt. Will it be: physical, using mixed

traditional mediums to create more tactical and

organic mood boards? Use the various digital tools

at your disposal? It might be that whatever approach

you elected for in step 2 dictates this option if

working remotely.

4. Create a final digital mood board, or curate a

selection of digitised mood boards, ready for

feedback. You will need to digitise your mood

boards if you elected to choose physical medium

as your creation approach (digital photograph or

scan) in order to share your work.

Once you have completed all the above steps, please

share the collaborative Google Doc with

James Field ( [email protected] ) and

Björn Stockleben ( [email protected] ).

We will endeavour to add feedback to the document

in the form of comments and recommendations (if

required). You can then respond until we have resolved

everything.

Each team can also request a time and date for live

feedback via Google Hangout if they wish.

Mood boards are the next logical step in the

branding development process once all the

initial research and competitor analysis has been

undertaken. By this stage you know enough

about the company, product or service, and their

potential branding story or angle, for you to

start emphasising with the message the brand

is required to communicate. You will also know

enough about how your client’s competitors,

successful and not so, have approached

their branding and you should have a firm

understanding of the target audience, their

expectations and the current trend(s) in branding

design.

The task, introduced shortly, for this workshop

gives you either the option to continue responding

the design brief in the last workshop, or use any

branding design project or brief you have currently

developed to the extent outlined above.

Task

In your teams from the last workshop (or teams

of 2 - 3 if you are starting afresh) you are either to

create mood boards for the branding design brief

set last workshop or you can create mood boards

for a new brief that you have suitably developed

(see above).

This is to be a collaborative task, but you are

free to decide how you are going to approach

collaborative working (either synchronous or

asynchronous) and also which creation method

you wish to use (mixed physical medium or digital).

Please be aware that regardless of which method

you select, your response will ultimately be

digitised for feedback.

Approach

1. Decide upon which brief you wish to create the

mood boards for. Will it be a continuation from

the brief set in the previous workshop? Or will

be a new brief you are working on? If you do

elect the later, you must ensure it is developed

to a state as described in the first paragraph of

this page.

2. Next you need to decide how the team will

approach collaborating on this task. Will you

work asynchronously and meet back at an

agreed time to compare mood boards? If so,

how will you elect to choose the best mood

board? Will you create a “master” mood board

based on the best bits individual’s work? Will

this selection process observe democratic

models? Work synchronously in real-time? Is

this possible in the physical? Or is digital the

only viable option for your team?

Workshop Guide


Happy moodboarding!

OnCreate Branding Design Course Workshop 2: Mood Board

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Transcript of OnCreate Branding Design Course Workshop 2: Mood Board