Building a brand that represents you perfectly and appeals directly to your favourite people can take a bit of effort. The best brands spend a lot of money on hiring large creative studios to spend many months on research, inspiration, creation, and perfection; you get the idea – it’s a lot. When we’re talking about your business, you might not have the astronomical budget to justify that process.
For a small business, you may need to create your own brand, and that’s challenging. There is a wide band of middle ground here – creative studios, like yours truly, are specialists at creating beautiful branding (if we can be so immodest) without charging enormous sums, and some work within tight boundaries to make a brand on a budget. We’d always recommend hiring the best people, as much as you can fit in your budget – branding is one of those assets that always give more than they take.
But you’re likely here to find out some trusty tips and iconic insights about mood boarding from your favourite creative design studio, so let’s get into it.
How to build your own mood board with free resources
It’s important to us that the suggestions we provide here aren’t going to cost you an arm and a leg – the point is to build your board with the tools at hand. So, before we start suggesting websites to visit, resources to peruse, or the right software for building and viewing your mood board, you need some direction.
1. What does your brand want?
Before you begin assembling materials or striking out in inspired directions, you need to know where you’re going and what you’re hoping to achieve! This step is immensely important, and it’s honestly a large portion of the value you get from seeing a studio for some outside help.
Consider, and, by all means, jot down some answers to these questions:
- Who are we? What do we sell/offer? When did we start? How did we start? Where are we going? Why there? What truly matters to us above all else?
- Who wants/needs/can use our product/service? Who do we want as a customer/client? What are they like? What are their jobs/lifestyles/home lives/hobbies/likes/dislikes?
- What problem do we solve for that person? What is their life like without us? What can it be like with us?
- What does everyone else in our industry/field/niche do? How are we different?
These simple questions are a boiled-down conceptualised version of the work we do as a design studio, but for your own mood board, they’ll give you plenty of direction. With the answers you’ve written, you’ll get a really good idea of the type of message you need to project.
2. Find some inspiration.
Inspiration can come from any large, small, significant, or inconsequential thing. It can be an experience you had on holiday (or work!), a conversation with a friend, or even a random abstract thought that just sailed through your mind last Tuesday; it’s the simple joy of creativity. That said, it’s a lot easier to just find brands you already like!
Search the web, find your favourite brands, explore the brands that line up really well with your ideal client, view their websites, look at their products or their messaging, and immerse yourself. Keep all of the answers that you’ve written down from step one within sight; they’ll guide you to the right ideas. It’s also a good idea to keep the persona of your ideal client in mind, too – you want to appeal to that person with pleasing imagery, a relatable message, and inspiring themes.
If you have 30 tabs open at once, you know you’re on the right track!
3. Build a body of media.
This step can be difficult; a trained eye is experienced at mixing media to find a message, but for a casual user, it may take some trial and error. The best way to go about it? Find as much “on-brand” content as you can find, and be ready for some old-school trial and error.
Besides pinching screenshots of your favourite brands, there are a whole host of free-to-use, creative commons, and royalty-free image sources around the web just waiting for you:
If you have a small budget for your mood board, we’d recommend Death to Stock – it’s a fresh breath from stock photos and might add a little more life to your mood board.
Besides the vast pool of stock photos to pull from, Pinterest is an excellent resource for mood boarding. Not only will it send you down a rabbit hole of creative design (the good kind), but it also lets you sort by colour palettes and styles with way more creative takes on media. It’s a great way to buff up your board with conceptual pictures to space out the photography.
4. Compile and collate.
Without years of design experience under your belt, you’re likely to build a few mismatched amalgams of clashing colours, messages, and styles before you really hit gold. The best way to get through the tricky step of collating is through variety and effort. Either build long flowing mood boards that you can take a snip from to keep, or just make several boards with different ideas involved in each.
For software, try Canva. It’s free for just about anything mood board-related and has a bunch of handy tools to tweak and shift your designs around. If you have photoshop already loaded up, by all means, we love photoshop, use it.
Use your brand research and inspiration to guide your mood board, and keep asking and answering those questions until some sense begins to form, and before you know it, you’ll have a brand that just works.
From mood board to stylescape
With your mood board, you’ll have a tidy little document to inform and provide for your branding. Even with a minimal online presence, the insights and unifying ideas it gives you is impactful across the board, from social media posting to simple interaction with customers and clients.
But a mood board can only take you so far. With a representative, intentionally designed brand, you’ll see a larger impact and have something to invest in and see grow with your business. When you feel it’s time for your business to reach for the next big goal, invest in a comprehensive brand with all the bells and whistles. You’ll see the full potential of a mood board (or stylescape as we present in review), and grow your reach to find and establish that next great client relationship.
