HOW TO CREATE A MOOD BOARD

I need to let you in on a little secret. I’ve designed more rooms than I can count without a mood board. In fact until I did my first One Room Challenge I had never actually created my own mood board before (a big thank you to my bestie Erica who actually made my ideas come to life on paper). It is really wild to think about because you guys, mood boards are where all your ideas inside your head come to life. I love to create multiple rounds of mood boards with clients. Today I am going to share with you how I personally like to create a mood board.

I believe that there is no right or wrong way to create a mood board. The purpose of the board is to bring your ideas and inspiration to life to help guide you with the design choices you are going to be making to pull your space together. 

Where To Start

Pinterest is a great place to start. Here you can search for inspiration that is entirely imaged based. I love to make individual boards per space to help collect my thoughts and see where I am going. I tell my clients to just pin everything and anything they like. Ideally I am looking for them to provide me with information about the overall vibe they want the room to create. No need to get specific on me yet! By this I mean I don’t need to know the exact rug you want or what light you’ve been lusting over for months. But at the same time if it’s a piece you just can’t live without or already have going into your space by all means pin that too! 

Collect Images

Once you’ve pinned all the things it’s time to go back through your board and see what correlation you are having. More often than not you are going to notice you have trends that you are drawn towards. I like to take mental notes of these things as I scroll through the pinterest board. From there I pick several images to work with based on the repeated trends I am seeing. I either take a screenshot of these images or drag them to my desktop. 

Find A Platform

Now it’s time to start building your mood board. You have lots of options for where you can create one. I actually use two different places to build them. First I create what I call a ‘working mood board’ in dropbox paper. I call these my working mood boards because these are the images I pull off pinterest to see if we are moving in the right direction with the design. From there I pick two to three images that truly work as our design inspiration and we work with those to pick out more specific design elements that we hope to land inside the space. I build a second mood board inside Apple Keynote. 

Please note there are plenty of other platforms you can use to create mood boards and for the moment this is what I am using. I too could change based on what platform I am liking working with.

Design From Inspiration

Now is the time to get into the specifics of your project. I love adding lighting, paint, furniture,  fixtures, decor and flooring into my mood boards. These can either be the exact ones you are going to use or ones you are inspired by. This last part is how your project comes to life. 

More mood board ideas 

Master Bedroom

Master Bathroom

Shared Boys Bedroom

Mudroom

Living Room