It’s easy to think of a moodboard as a project best suited for a teenage sleepover, but if you’re restricting your definition to this narrow idea, you’re missing out on a valuable tool for your business. A moodboard is like an informal precursor to your brand style guide, and it’s the perfect way to help define and refine your brand’s visual identity.
Benefits of Creating a Moodboard for Your Business
They Give Your Projects Direction
A moodboard is a collection of images, text and typography, colors, textures, and other elements that help you define what you’d like your brand to look and feel like. Since descriptive language of your concepts for your business’s collateral can often be subjective and imprecise, a moodboard is immensely helpful when you’re trying to confirm and communicate the look and feel of your business to others. Doing the legwork to have this tool at your disposal can help you communicate your vision more efficiently, which has the added benefit of helping you make sure that design project costs stay low. If you can communicate exactly what you like in your initial meeting with a designer, you’ll save yourself time-consuming edits and reworks in the long run.
They Keep Your Brand on Track
Your mood board can help keep your business collateral and content marketing on track, visually illustrating what is and isn’t acceptable for your brand. While your brand style guide will include some text and verbal guidelines for your brand, your moodboard will be almost entirely visual. When in doubt about a design or piece of brand collateral, you can check it against the visual record of your moodboard to make sure that the project you’re working on looks and feels aligned with the overall mood and tone you’re trying to accomplish.
How to Create Your Moodboard
Choose Your Medium
Grab some paper and glue, open a blank word document, or begin a moodboard on Pinterest – whatever will help you capture and visually organize your ideas. If none of these seem like mediums you’d like to use, check out these moodboard creation apps.
Keep Your Audience in Mind
Creating a moodboard isn’t just about what you think looks great for your business; it helps you define what you think your audience would resonate with as well. When choosing your moodboard elements, keep your audience in mind and try to find images, typography, and other elements that will grab their attention and signal to them that your brand is for them.
Think Outside the Box
Don’t limit yourself to obvious colors and images; try to get creative in finding textures, patterns, and symbolic pieces of art or digital imagery that invoke similar feelings you want your brand to create. The more creative you can let yourself be through this process, the more specific you can get about how to visually define your brand in a way that makes you proud and keeps your audience interested.
Defining and maintaining your brand’s visual identity is key in today’s marketing landscape. Make sure that you’re taking advantage of easy-to-implement tools like moodboards to keep all of your brand and marketing efforts on track.
Consistent presentation of a brand can increase revenue by 33%.
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