Creating a mood board is one of my favorite parts about branding because it serves as your own creative director—it guides you as you create all the elements of your brand design, while also reminding you of your foundational brand vision (especially when things start to feel hazy, as they often do along the entrepreneurial journey).

While a designer can help you put together a mood board that reflects the overall feeling you want your brand to have, you can easily create one for yourself if you’re still in the DIY stage. Here are our best tips for doing just that:

WHAT IS A MOOD BOARD?

A mood board is a collection of images, colors, and textures that reflect the overall goal, values, and feeling you want to achieve in your brand. It’s important to create a mood board early in the design process so that it can help you focus on your unique brand instead of being tempted to follow trends. It also helps by providing a much stronger creative direction right from the start, so you can take the guesswork out of your branding process down the road.

Mood boards are all about conveying the overall voice and vibe of a brand (for more tips on how to clarify your brand’s voice and vibe, check out this post) and therefore serve as a great check in during every step in the design process. We recommend looking at your mood board any time you’re designing, choosing stock images, writing copy, or creating products and services for your brand to make sure they are all aligned with the creative direction of your mood board.

Here are some example mood boards we’ve created in the past:

SOME QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU GET STARTED

Before designing or updating your website, consider these questions, as they will help you design a website that fits you and moves your dream client to action.

Describe your ideal client in vivid detail.
If your brand were a person, what brand of clothing would they wear?
What three words describe the feelings you want your website to have? For example, high-end, clean, simple, approachable, inspirational, peaceful, etc.
Now, think of 3 websites that you absolutely love. Write out WHY you love each one- WHAT specific elements do you like on each site? The more specific you can be here, the clearer of a vision we will have for your website. For example: the emotions you get from the site (define them), colors, fonts, shapes, graphics, full-screen photos, offset details, balanced details, etc.
What colors do you definitely want to include in your brand/website?
What colors do you definitely want to avoid?

CREATING THE BOARD

When creating a mood board, always start by creating a bank that you feel represents your brand. I recommend Pinterest for this task.

While in Pinterest, start by creating a brand new board labeled "Brand Mood Board"- this is where you will pin visuals that inspire you for your brand and website. Start by searching for keywords related to your brand theme and see what comes up for you.

Then, narrow down based on creating a consistent look that matches your style, dream clients, and the feelings you’re trying to communicate through your brand.

Choose ~5 pins for each of these categories (20-25 total pins):

colors
fonts
textures
patterns
lighting

Use this checklist to help guide you as you narrow down your mood board:

Keep your board within ~20 images. This will help you narrow down your brand and think carefully about each pin.
For each pin, change the “description” section of the pin. Write what you like about that specific pin. For example, do you like the color scheme, fonts, textures, patterns, design layout, etc.
Aim for consistency. The whole board should be a cohesive visual representation of what you think fits the look and feel of what you want your site to be.

To give you some more examples, here are some mood boards we used when creating some of our Squarespace Website Templates:

USING THE MOOD BOARD

Mood boards are all about the feeling of a brand and therefore serve as a great check in during every step in the design process. The best way to use it is as a reference point for all your design decisions.

This might include: