Why Your Creative Business Needs A Mood Board

Looking through my childhood bedroom, I found the precursor to my designer dreams gathering dust on the top shelf of my closet. There they were rolled, folded and mashed together. The collages I created out of fashion magazines for fun starting in high school.

I used old posters and neon pink poster board from abandoned school projects as my personal canvas. I’d rip pages out of the magazines, cut out what I wanted, then meticulously tape them on to my base. Basically, these were mood boards of my favorite colors and visuals before I knew what a mood board was.

Here are 3 reasons why you need a mood board as a creative or creative business owner.

Staying Consistent

Staying consistent doing anything these days is a challenge. Understatement of the century. :)

Add staying visually consistent and appealing to your target audience and it’s easy to see why so many creative business owners will bury their heads in the sand.

We take in so much information and photos daily. It’s almost impossible not to see a brand with visuals that appeal to you.

The problem is when you feel the need to change your brand design every time you see something new or exciting. Design FOMO is very real.

When you stay consistent across all your touchpoints online, social media, email, and your website, people will recognize your unique branding.

Standing out from the sea of sameness online means people will remember and go back to you for your services.

A common color palette across industries is the minimal, beige palette. While there’s nothing wrong with beige, for me it’s a bit boring, when so many different people and businesses have the same or similar brand colors, they all start to blend together.

Then when a potential customer finds you, they don’t really remember your business because it was so similar to others.

Unless they saved it or took a screenshot of your site, you might just fade into obscurity. Having a unique and consistent brand will prevent this.

Tangible Reference

Having a touch point for your visual identity just makes things easier. Especially in those early days of your creative business when you can’t remember the exact shade of plum that’s yours. Distraction and trying to remember a million things can always get the best of us.

Revisiting your mood board often makes it easy to remember the visuals that matter most and resonate with you and your brand.

Whether your mood board is a very organized square grid of pictures and colors or if you like to go a little wild, like me, a chaotic collage that contains everything.

While I love browsing Pinterest, it’s so easy to get sucked into the endless scroll and end up a million miles from where you started.

This is why saving your mood board as it’s own file or photo to live on your phone or computer is easier and better for your brain. No need to be sidetracked by pretty pictures.

Room To Grow

Like any document that’s not set in stone, your mood board can change. Doing brand refreshes or a total rebranding is totally normal for us creatives.

When things no longer resonate for you or your potential clients, changing it up just makes sense.

I recently refreshed the official Redesignia mood board and brand. It wasn’t a total rebrand overhaul but I wanted my creative design business to reflect me and my ideal clients a bit more which has shifted over the last few years. Even brand designers aren’t immune to needing a brand refresh.

Narrowing down the niche that appeals to people also helps you stand out. Online business owners isn’t specific enough. You can narrow it down by industry, age range or insert other demographic you want to work with. For me, I want to work with creative weirdos running service based businesses.

Feeling Inspired?

If you’re feeling inspired to create a mood board for your brand I’ve launched a free mood board challenge. In less than a week, you’ll create a mood board with the help of a web designer, me, all from the comfort of your email. Take the mood board challenge.