The ultimate branding mood board

Want to make sure your brand is beautiful, consistent and totally you?

Having a brand that is easily recognizable only comes from consistency. A branding mood board is an easy and fun way to get a consistent look and feel at one glance. It helps as a visual reference when creating your content. It is also a very important step when starting to create your brand.

So download my mood board templates and start visualizing your own business!!

For a lot of entrepreneurs, creating a branding mood board can feel like a huge waste of time.

Creating one however has a couple of advantages:

• It helps you to conceptualize your brand before you get to the design phase.
• Giving you clarity on who your potential clients are and what style would resonate with them.
• It becomes a guiding light for all your visual elements you use on your web, social media and marketing material.
• Helps to give your brand personality.
• It helps you to match your brand qualities to you content

A branding mood board is more than just a couple of pretty pictures.

• It is a whole process in itself
• Helping you with the clarification of what your business is all about.
• Your mood board guides the emotional response your business will provoke through the use of colors, images, textures and fonts.

How to create: The ultimate branding mood board

So by now you know that a mood board can help you to:

• Conceptualize your brand before you get to the design phase.
• Get clarity on who your potential clients are and what style would resonate with them.
• Act as guide for all your visual elements you use on your web, social media and marketing material.
• Give your brand personality.
• Match your brand qualities to your content

This is all good, but if you’re not a designer, the task can seem a bit daunting at first. In this course we will focus on creating a digital mood board. You can however just as easily make a tangible one. This can be a very satisfying project if you are up to planning, cutting and sticking

This guide however is created specially to help you through the process of creating a digital mood board, but the steps for a tangible one would almost be the same.

For this process you will need:

• A computer (duh)
• Internet access (Google and ultimately, Pinterest)
• Photoshop or Canva (if you don’t know about Canva, it’s a free online platform that you can use to design your content. This is super easy to use if you don’t have Photoshop. Visit www.canva.com)
• A cup of coffee (yes, this is essential to make it more fun!)

STEP 1 – GET INSPIRATION

The first step you need to do is start collecting images that represent to you what you feel represent your brand.

I would highly recommend creating a Pinterest board just for this. This ensure that all your images are in one place and easy to find.

You can now start to search for images via Pinterest itself or Google. To do this, start typing in words that you want to associate with your brand. Let’s say for example you sell candles. Think about how you want people to feel when using your candles. You might search for words like nature; relax; tranquil; sunshine etc. You can pin a good 20-40 images through your search process.

You don’t have to limit yourself to the internet. Go out and look for inspiration in the world around you. Take your own photos and upload them to your board.

Remember that quotes can also be included, or just fonts that you feel could work for you.

STEP 2 – YOU’RE THE CURATOR

Now that you have tons of inspiration, it is time take a deep, hard and long look at all your images. It is now time to start thinking clearly about who your dream customers are. What do they like (or don’t like). Will they feel the same inspiration from the images you’ve pinned? What colors do they prefer? Will they love the fonts?

Be very critical about the images and pick only those that really showcase the emotion that your brand is portraying. Those images that will get your potential customers attention. When you are done, you should end up with the following:
2-5 images
1-2 text examples
1-2 patterns or textures.

Remember when sorting through your images that there should always be one larger image, supported by the smaller images. The reason for this that the larger image is the focus of what your brand is about, but without a doubt leaving some questions in the viewers mind. These questions should then be answered by the rest of the supporting images.

STEP 3 – GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY

So this is not literally getting dirty, except if you’re me and doing a physical mood board it might be inevitable. Now the fun part start in putting it together.

Start by picking a template. You can choose from any of my templates that you’ve received or any other template you like.

Once you are happy with your choice you can pick your main image. This will be your larger image in most templates.

From there you place the rest of the images that tells most about what you want the brand to portray.

After placing your images, you’ll immediately see the colors that are most dominant throughout the rest of the board. Choose the with the picker tool and fill the color spots. Some online templates don’t leave space for this, and because we’re creating this with a brand in mind, I feel that it is absolutely necessary to put it in. All my templates have space for this, so grab them below!

Once your branding mood board is complete, you can save it as a jpeg file to send to people when they help you with any form of design for your business. I would also suggest this be the starting point when you want to design (or update) your own logo. If you need help with that, you can find my packages here.