Creating a Mood Board for Your Brand Session

A mood board (or vision board) can capture the visual vibe of your session, and it can be a really useful tool! That’s why my clients and I don’t shy away from using a platform like Pinterest to find and collect inspiration. Creating a mood board for your brand session can help bring your dreams to life.

We certainly don’t copy exact pins/images or other artists’ work, but we can use pins as reference. We gather pins that reflect your brand’s vibe and values, and curate a look and feel.

Pinterest is a very powerful tool, and is actually an image-based search engine!

So how can we build a useful mood board or vision board for your brand session? When we work together, I typically recommend we follow this process:

1. Gather colors, textures, shot list ideas, fonts/words, architecture, and general vibe images that you’re instinctively drawn to. This is the data-gathering part of the process that is like brainstorming — there are no wrong answers!
2. Narrow down and curate the images. Not everything will stay, some images may be pretty, but if they are not significant we weed them out. Significant means they match the (1) message, (2) values, and (3) vibe of your brand. If images/pins meet all 3 criteria, they stay. If not, we let them go.
3. Organize into what will be our final mood board design, via a platform like Canva. This is the step where we take all those great images and arrange them in a board. It sounds easy, but we take our time to create a balanced, inspirational-looking board!

Many times, people skip Step 2 and throw everything onto their board. While there’s no wrong way to build your mood board, that can be overwhelming and send mixed messages! You want to make sure the board is refined and curated, so that the images that stay are important. Each image should have a clear purpose and drive the vision of the brand session.

Hope this helps next time you need to create a mood board! If you’re looking for guidance and want to build a board for your next session or shoot, contact me today.