Why we stopped using mood boards
Date:
Author:
Lena Voss
Read time:
5 min
The comfort problem
Mood boards feel like design. They have the visual grammar of design — they involve selection, arrangement, the exercise of taste. Clients respond well to them because they are legible in a way that a blank brief is not. And that is precisely the problem.
A mood board does not solve anything. It defers the actual question — what should this brand or this product feel like, and why — by surrounding it with answers borrowed from work that already exists. Instead of starting from the specific problem in front of us, we were starting from a library of solutions to other people's problems.
The worst outcome, which happened more than once, was that a client fell in love with a reference image so completely that the project never moved beyond it. We had accidentally set the ceiling before we had dug the foundation.
The comfort problem
Mood boards feel like design. They have the visual grammar of design — they involve selection, arrangement, the exercise of taste. Clients respond well to them because they are legible in a way that a blank brief is not. And that is precisely the problem.
A mood board does not solve anything. It defers the actual question — what should this brand or this product feel like, and why — by surrounding it with answers borrowed from work that already exists. Instead of starting from the specific problem in front of us, we were starting from a library of solutions to other people's problems.
The worst outcome, which happened more than once, was that a client fell in love with a reference image so completely that the project never moved beyond it. We had accidentally set the ceiling before we had dug the foundation.
What we do instead
The shift was not dramatic. We did not arrive at a new methodology so much as we started asking a different first question.
Instead of "what should this feel like," we began asking "what does this need to do?" Not aesthetically — functionally. A brand for a private bank needs to communicate stability before it communicates sophistication. A cultural institution needs to feel open before it feels prestigious. An e-commerce site for handmade ceramics needs to slow the visitor down, not convert them at speed.
Once you know what the work needs to do, the aesthetic decisions become less arbitrary. The typeface is not chosen because it appeared on three of our reference slides — it is chosen because its weight and spacing communicate exactly the degree of formality the brand requires. The colour is not an expression of the studio's current palette — it is a response to the specific emotional register the work needs to occupy.
The reference conversation
We still look at references. We would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, and we would be worse designers for it. But we now have that conversation differently — later in the process, with specific questions, and without presenting it as a direction.
We might show a client three typefaces set in their actual brand name and ask which one feels right and why. The conversation that follows is more useful than any amount of aspirational imagery, because it is grounded in the specific problem rather than someone else's solution to a different one.
An honest caveat
This does not work for every client or every brief. Some clients need the visual scaffolding of references to engage with the abstract question of what their brand should feel like. There is no shame in that — it is a hard question, and most people are not trained to think about it.
What we have found is that when we use references now, we use them surgically rather than structurally. They illustrate a point rather than make one. That distinction, small as it sounds, has changed how we work more than almost anything else.