Creating moodboards is something I was taught from a very early age. In primary school, they were a simple mixed-media way of expressing a form of an idea.

The thing I find interesting about mood boards is not the end-result, but the process of creation. Watching my children make posters from torn up bits of newspaper and magazines is really no different to watching my clients do it. Similar to watching other activities – such as affinity sorting, or depth interviewing – it’s the listening that I find interesting. Every moodboard tells a story, and as a designer, listening to your clients tell that story when they make them can be very insightful.

Making moodboards for you, not for me.

I have to be honest, I don’t make moodboards for myself. Not physical ones anyway. When I familiarise myself with a brand, or make some suggestions for design context, I always try to place those things in a context the client understands. This is where design visuals are important. They are almost unsurpassed in their immediacy of understanding for a client because they show the design in context. Of course, replace that with a high fidelity prototype, and you get the same thing. But, I want to step back a little here, as to when I find creating moodboards valuable.

Let me ask you a question: how many times have you heard this from a client?

‘I’m not so sure I think the design is heading in the right direction’. ‘It needs more pop’. ‘It’s just not us’.

These are all because a client cannot communicate about design at the same level we do. So, it’s abstract. Either that, or:

‘I don’t like that green’. ‘That button is great! But, it needs more pop’. ‘The logo needs to be bigger’.

Then things get subjective and extremely detailed. Why? Because these are approachable things people can comment on. More often than not, these comments are a failing that should rest firmly on our shoulders. We need to give our clients the words and understanding to express their thoughts. Either that, or we tease out these issues earlier in the process, in a way that is abstracted from the design work that will come later. This is where I feel collaborative moodboards work extremely well.

So, why would want to try and run one of these sessions?

  1. When a client’s brand is repositioning, sometimes we’re brought in very early on the back of a strategy. No tactical work as been done. So, it’s up to us to navigate the waters of implementing the branding strategy. Making design work on the back of a few bullet points in a slide deck can be challenging.

  2. Usually in a discover process, I will get a few red flags from speaking with a client. Generally these come through when talking about competitors, or things they like.

  3. When I get conflicting stories from different stakeholders. The homepage team has a completely different view on the branding than the marketing team.

  4. When branding needs evolving. A lot of organisations have mature branding collateral for print and advertising. Not so much for web (still!), so these are useful exercises to start to tease out differences or how they can align to the web in future.

I’m sure there are more, but those are few I can think of off the top of my head for now.

How to run a collaborative moodboard session

  1. Get the stakeholders in a room. 3-4 is ideal. 9 is way too many.
  2. Bring with you lots of magazines, newspapers, flyers – just physical paper stuff – that you can all cut up.
  3. Glue. Lots of glue. One tub each.
  4. Large (A1) pieces of paper.

The thing about this that I find interesting from a people-watching/behaviour perspective, is that the act of cutting things up and sticking them down is something that most of these people wouldn’t have done since school. The process involves collaborating, getting stuck-in and discussing the work. I find it a great leveller for the client team (hierarchy quickly disappears), and a very good ice breaker.

You set the brief for the morning/afternoon (all day is generally too long for the making part of this process). The idea is to find content that communicates part of the visual story of the product – and that could be anything:colour, type, texture, image – and stick it down.

For the agency team, it’s our job to ask questions throughout the day. To tease out the insights as people are in the moment of choice – before they’ve had chance to post-rationalise. And you know what? Answers like: ‘I just really like this green’ are great, because our next question is ‘Why?’ and it forces rationale. Without us being there, and asking that, almost always post-rationalising and ‘business stuff’ gets in the way of finding the truth behind those choices.

Quite often, just like cave paintings, moodboards are an artefact of a conversation. We often discard them from this point because they have served their purpose. We have the insights. The marketing team are best buddies with the homepage team. We all heading in the same direction.

So, next time you start a project and you need some steer on branding, or reconciling differences of opinion on a client team, try collaborative moodboarding as a way of coming together to try and solve the problem.