Moodboard Maker - Make a Mood Board in 30 Seconds
I’m a Designer and Illustrator, and we use mood boards almost every day. They are a huge part of the entertainment & design industry.
Mood boards are used in Fashion, Animation, Film, Video Games, Photography, Illustration, Theme Parks, Toy Design, Product Design, Car Design, Graphic Design, Branding, Wedding Planning, Interior Decoration, and Web Design.
Mood boards are sometimes also known as reference boards, inspiration boards, or design boards. It’s essentially a collage made for the design team to come up with ideas during the creative process.
— Julia Kying, Designer, Illustrator, Conceptualist
It adds a lot of value if you can put together a mood board quickly —
It gets your creative juices flowing and lets you ‘communicate’ your thoughts to your fellow designers.
Once you have refined your ideas enough — a mood board lets you present your ideas to clients, win pitches, and make them understand the design early. This significantly reduces the chances of costly surprises late in the project.
So having one in the early stages, at least a preliminary one, will help you reduce costs and improve design quality — by improved visualization & better transfer of ideas and thoughts.
Objective #1: You want to come up with that first mood board quickly and then iterate.
Given the following images to make a mood board from:
Would you prefer the following board or the one at the start of this post?
In our small and impromptu study, 8 out of 10 designers preferred the board at the start of the post. Simply because the one above crops images and misses out on details that might seem small. Still, these can result in a sub-standard final design.
Objective #2: The mood board should preferably not crop the images.
Remember:
This isn’t a post about what a mood board should look like. Whether to use a tight grid or a freeform layout. What kind of images to keep and which to discard. All that depends on what the board is for, who will see it, etc.
This post is about making a mood board — quickly & without cropping the used images.
How to create a mood board in less than 30 seconds:
1. Download and install TurboCollage. It takes less than a minute to download and complete the installation. Download here.
Why download a moodboard app? Why not online?
a. More often than not, images come with a non-disclosure agreement. The possibility they could leak on the internet is something no design studio would risk.
With downloaded TurboCollage software, your images remain on your computer. You can be sure that they are safe from theft.
b. When it comes to editing a large number of really high quality, high resolution, big images — downloaded software is simply more suitable. There is no need to download or upload images, and you get faster and more powerful processing. No waiting — it just works!
2. Open Turbocollage, select the Mosaic pattern, and select the size of your board.
3. Set border width to zero and turn shadows off.
4. Add pictures to your board.
5. Use the intelligent layout tool to get a mood board arrangement that you like.
and the fun part:
Your photos wouldn’t be cropped in the layout!
Want to see the above in action? Here's a 30-second video:
A quick word on mood board templates & why we aren’t big fans
Templates are great for two reasons — they are fast and easy to use.
But:
Templates pigeonhole the designer to a design, and the creativity element is lost. Where’s the creativity when you already have to choose from one of the templates?
Here’s the deal:
TurboCollage brings you the best of both worlds — it’s super easy and fast, enabling your creativity!
So the next time you want to quickly make a mood board — use TurboCollage; chances are that you wouldn’t need any other tool. You can always move over to a far more involved and exponentially more expensive tool like Photoshop to refine your design.
And don’t forget to email your comments and suggestions to apps@silkenmermaid.com
