UX Playbook

Design direction

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Mood Boards are design deliverables consisting of visual elements that capture the high level style of a design direction. It is basically a collage of images and text in a composition. Created in the early stage of a project they help you setup the direction for the rest of the design. Also they help you review visual ideas with the team or client to agree on the initial direction. Mostly they are followed up with a Style Tile and are used as reference point.

Deliverables

It makes sense to create up to three Mood Boards, each with a different direction to capture the entire spectrum of desired directions. There is no specified size for the document, but keep in mind that it’s presentation material, so it should at least fit nicely on a Keynote slide or an A3 sheet of paper.

What do you need?

For starters you need input from the client about the brand positioning and strategy of this project. Together this defines the directions to explore: does it need to have a business look? Or appeal to females? Match a specific brand identity like Philips? Use this input as a starting point. This can be achieved by facilitating a brand identity workshop.

Who do you need?

How it works

  1. Make sure your starting point is the brand positioning. This can be existing guidelines or the debrief of the visual identity workshop that has been hosted earlier.
  2. Decide how you want to present it and choose a size/format that best matches.
  3. Define the different themes you want to explore and describe them with words.
  4. Use platforms like Pinterest, Dribbble or Behance to get input for your themes and collect them accordingly.
  5. Make sure each theme has its own distinctive title, look and feel.
  6. Provide a rationale. Make it clear to yourself why you’ve made the design choices you’ve made and how they relate to the brand. This way you can defend your design and perhaps even push the client into picking the“right”direction.

Elements

There are no rules as to what elements should be included in a mood board. It could depend on what the product will be. But in general you can think of the following: