If you want your business to mean something to your target audience, its essence should be consistently reflected across all aspects of your branding. Any creative branding elements should be aligned with the brand personality, ethos and messaging. Only once you are clear on those aspects of your business can you begin to create a truly meaningful, cohesive and strategic visual identity.
One way to guide consistency in the look and feel of your brand is to define a design direction or visual ‘mood’ using a moodboard. A mood board – or inspiration board – is simply a collection of images, words, colour palettes, patterns and textures that work together to convey the overall vibe or aesthetic of a design. They’re most associated with fashion, interior and graphic design, but are often created for weddings, floristry and event styling, too. Moodboarding is a really nice visual way of distilling your brand essence into a cohesive look and feel. It can be done either manually – using magazine cutouts, postcards, photographs, packaging, and so on – or digitally.
Pinterest is my personal favourite for this stage of the brand design process, and if you’d like to know how to go about creating your own moodboard, read on.
Here’s how to use Pinterest to create your brand moodboard, step-by-step:
- Take your brand essence (core business values, mission, brand personality, value proposition, and customer persona) as your starting point.
- Write down 10-15 individual words that you feel best describe your business in relation to these aspects, and how it makes people feel (or how you’d ideally like it to make them feel).
- On Pinterest, search for two or three pins (posts) for each of the brand words you’ve come up with and save them onto a ‘longlist’ Pinterest board. Try to include a mix of photography, graphics, typography, words, colour palettes, patterns, and anything else that catches your eye.
- Once you have put your Pinterest board together, start rearranging the pins into groups: those that work really well together, those that speak loudest to you, those that evoke a particular emotion or feeling – whatever works for you. Be guided by what’s in front of you – this bit can be as intuitive as you like.
- Once you’ve had a good play around with your longlist, select 6-9 pins that you feel work best together to sum up your brand vibe or essence.
- Now, you can either add them to a new brand board on Pinterest, or copy the images into a template in Canva or a photo collage app to create your final mood board.
- If you’re a perfectionist like me, you’ll probably want to switch the images around until you’ve got a vibe and composition you love. Once you’re happy, it’s good to go!
Why not print out your brand moodboard and pin it up in your office? You could even print the individual elements and arrange them on the wall or a pegboard for a Pinterest-worthy aesthetic of your own!
Then you’ll have a visual cue to guide the rest of your brand identity and creative elements, and help maintain consistency whenever you are creating marketing collateral in the future.
While you’re thinking about your brand identity, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
