What is a mood board and why you should start a UI/UX design project with it

While strategies and technical requirements are easily conveyed in words, the visual design isn’t. This explains why UI/UX designers prefer to capture the thoughts and feelings that a product design evokes. But there’s much more a mood board can do during the project, and this article is exactly about that. We’re going to discuss which elements make up a product design style and the 7 steps to create one. No more ado, let’s start!

What is a mood board in design?

Simply put, a mood board illustrates a future project’s visual vibe. Most of the time, it looks like a collage, containing style, colors, typography, and images that impart the general feeling of the design-in-making. The end goal of it is to communicate aesthetic qualities that are impossible to describe in writing.

Besides presenting the overall visuals for brainstorming communication, a mood board keeps the team in tune throughout the design stages. Sometimes, a project may eventually deviate from the original plan. To overcome such challenges, designers double-check the mood board and confirm if they’re still heading in the right direction.

At the early-stage meetings, mood boards help define the design’s style for team members or product owners to envision.

A universal mood board can either be physical or virtual. While the first is collections of cutout photos and pieces of fabric, the last relies on software and contains digital media. In a web design project, experts usually curate a variety of visual references using digital tools. There are no rigid rules — specialists might mix and match colors, typography, imagery, and even textures to capture the desired feel and style.

Reasons to start your design project with a mood board

Starting the design journey for a digital product with a mood board is a smart move. Why? It helps organize ideas more effectively, sparks inspiration, and makes it possible to compare alternatives side-by-side. Plus, these visual boards enable you to collaborate with others, especially external stakeholders, since it doesn’t require design experience.

The ideal time to produce a mood board is before wireframing. One reason is that it serves as a valuable, motivating thought process for an influential wireframe and, ultimately, mockup and prototype. If you’re curious about how these elements work together, our article on Wireframe vs Mockup vs Prototype breaks it down in detail. For those looking to perfect their wireframing skills, our guide on High-Fidelity Wireframes offers practical tips to get you started.

A wonderful mood board will ensure smooth communication, set aesthetic direction for future steps, and match creative vision with the real product.

What elements should be on a mood board?

The fact is, a mood board is an essential part of kicking off any design project. But to create one effectively, you need to know which elements to include. They can be vague or detailed, but often, the more items you include, the easier others visualize your ideas. Here’s a look at what you can put on your UI/UX mood board.

Branding elements

When working on a mood board, there’s a need to find and include elements such as logos, icons, slogans, patterns, and graphical elements that represent the brand identity. You may ask yourself, “What are the core values?” “What do you bring to your customers?” and “How can you help customers achieve what they want?”. These questions allow you to determine which items you should incorporate and what direction to take.

If you’re unsure where to start, you can rely on startup branding services for incredible assistance in brand persona, from discovering and defining concepts to implementing strategies consistently across platforms. With experts on board, you can rest assured that your identity will be well-recognizable and stimulate the desired mood for customers.   

Basic UI components

One of the factors directly affecting the user experience is UI components, and adding some basic details to your mood board is a great decision. Think about including essential elements like search bars, dropdown menus, navigation buttons, and input fields. But don’t stop there — consider how these components will function and interact with one another. For instance, will your navigation buttons be sticky as users scroll? Will the dropdown menus expand with animations or stay simple and static?

Also, consider how you’ll organize them around the page and whether they appeal to the audience for potential interactions. Will they be intuitive and easy to find, or are you aiming for a more unconventional design? No matter what you choose, each element adds to the overall vibe and usability of the interface.

Color palette

You don’t need to know about color psychology to understand that colors affect human emotions. In particular, they induce various feelings like excitement, warmth, security, serenity, passion, and so on. Hence, pick a color palette that works well with your brand identity and generates relevant energy for the product.

For example, if you’re designing a mood board for a cheerful, uplifting mini-game app, you might want to lean towards bright and vibrant colors like yellows, oranges, and light blues. These hues can convey a sense of joy and energy. On the other hand, if you’re working on a luxury brand, you might opt for a palette with rich golds, deep purples, and blacks to evoke a sense of elegance and sophistication.

Font styles

Typography plays an important part in catching attention and conveying your brand’s personality. Including font styles on your mood board is essential for exploring potential solutions that will shape the final product. First, consider the different roles fonts will play — headlines need to stand out, tags should be clear and concise, and body text must be easy to read.

Take some time to decide the font family, size, and weight you want for each of these elements. For instance, a bold, modern sans-serif might be perfect for headlines, while a clean, legible serif could work well for body text. If you want to find out more about beautiful options to represent your brand, refer to our 24 Serif Font Examples article. 

Visual graphics

You can’t miss out on collecting visual graphics for your mood board. These can come from anywhere — a poster you happen to come across on the street, an intriguing image on Pinterest, or even a snippet from a movie. Anything that catches your eye and sparks motivation is worth adding.

Remember that no mood board looks like another. It’s just a chance you see something relevant and capture it. Hence, a random screenshot may become a great source of ideas for your UI/UX design project. The key is to stay open to inspiration from all around you, capturing anything that resonates with the vibe you’re aiming to create.

7 main steps of mood board creation

Although there are no solid guidelines for building digital mood boards, we put together 7 steps that can help you master it. These recommendations are based on our experience working on UI/UX designs across various industries, and we hope they will be valuable to you. So, let’s get started!

1. Identify the goals and mood

The first step is to specify the goals you expect your product to deliver. Ask yourself what you’d like to feel when looking at the design. Is it a sense of happiness, fascination, or calmness that triggers you to explore more? In short, having clear goals for the design facilitates ideation and, consequently, a quality mood board that transfers to a successful user experience.

To gain a broader perspective, involve your team in this brainstorming process. Have a collaborative discussion where everyone shares the ideas and emotions they associate with the project. This could involve looking at competitor products, analyzing market trends, or even drawing inspiration from unrelated industries. By pooling together different viewpoints, you’ll develop a clearer understanding of the mood you want to set. 

2. Collect the visuals

The next thing is to search all sources and gather visuals. It doesn’t matter if you find an image, pattern, GIF, screenshot, footage, video clip, or even a piece of typography  — everything can contribute to the overall vision. More so, popular resources like Google Images, Pinterest, Behance, and Dribbble offer access to countless shapes, colors, and styles to explore.

In addition, try to maintain a unified series of pictures. You don’t want to see a big mess of conflicting graphics on the mood board. This adds a lot of confusion, leaving a huge gap between your vision and the final product. Instead, group them into smaller categories and note which character inspires you the most.

3. Experiment with color palette

Selecting relevant colors for the product theme is essential to evoke an impression. Include those that resonate with your brand identity and produce the best effects on the visual level. To find the palette that suits you best, look through platforms like Adobe Color, Palette App, and Coolors. 

Colors are the first thing the audience notices about your product. Therefore, including a relevant palette on the mood board is a must-do.

More importantly, you should also test if the chosen colors work well together. Sometimes, hues look better when they stand alone but not in a group. To avoid this, include more than one palette on the mood board. This will allow you to easily compare and see which combinations create the best overall effect. 

4. Explore typography and UI elements

Typography and UI elements contribute to the tone and style of the product design. To gather some ideas, you can browse open-source platforms like Typewolf, Google Fonts, Shuffle, and Material Design 3, along with design galleries full of inspiring works. However, the main thing is to confirm whether the selected fonts are compatible with UI elements.

This involves testing how the fonts look in different contexts, such as buttons, navigation menus, and form fields. Consider the readability, size, and weight of the fonts when paired with various UI components. For example, a thin, delicate font might look beautiful in headings but could be hard to read in smaller body text or buttons. Conversely, a bold, heavy typeface might overpower delicate UI elements.

5. Organize selected items

Once you have gathered all the pieces, it’s time to sort out which you find most connected with your product vision. In other words, you’ll create a hierarchy by arranging the items based on their importance and impact. 

The primary color palette and key typography choices should take center stage as they set the overall tone. Secondary elements, like supporting visuals or UI components, can be arranged around these focal points. Through this process, you can clarify which elements will have the most visual weight and influence in your design.

6. Review and refine the layout

Everything doesn’t fit together in one go, so be prepared to evaluate and adjust the layout constantly. Take your time to evaluate how well the components work together and make necessary tweaks to achieve a balanced and harmonious design. Bear in mind that this is a highly personalized process, and there’s no single “correct” way to arrange your mood board.

Experiment with different placements, groupings, and alignments until the layout feels just right. Don’t be afraid to move things around or even remove elements that don’t quite fit. This is your chance to let your imagination run wild and explore innovative ideas that might push your project in exciting new directions.

7. Present and gather feedback

Upon finalizing a mood board, share it with others. They can be teammates and clients — whoever offers constructive thoughts to improve it. To get specific feedback, consider creating a questionnaire asking how they feel about it, whether the visuals match the intended vibe, and if they believe the board effectively represents the project’s goals. Encourage open discussion and be receptive to all comments, even if they differ from your initial vision.

Then, compare their answers to your original goals and mood. If the feedback highlights areas where the board doesn’t fully align with the intended direction, take the opportunity to refine it. This might involve adding new elements, removing those that don’t fit, or rearranging items for a more cohesive and polished look.

Tools to create a mood board

When it comes to creating a mood board, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you craft one just the way you want. Take Figma, for example — it’s perfect if you’re looking to create, test, and share design ideas with a team. It’s super flexible and makes collaboration a breeze.

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Then there’s Miro, which offers an AI-supported visual mapping whiteboard. It’s great for organizing your ideas visually, especially when you’re working with others. If you want something easy to use with lots of templates, Canva is a solid choice. It’s a free tool that lets you build beautiful mood boards, even if you’re not a design expert. And, of course, Pinterest. It remains a platform full of inspiration where you can browse and collect tons of visual assets that can spark new ideas or help guide the project’s direction.

Depending on whether you work on it alone or with a team, choose effective tools that deliver the most value. A mix-and-match of them may also be a great option to utilize a wide range of sources.

End point

Creating mood boards is a process that thrives on enthusiasm, collaboration, and maybe a bit of coffee to keep things stress-free. It’s where your design ideas start to take shape, offering a space to explore visuals and refine creative direction. Instead of rushing into wireframing, take the time to build a thoughtful inspiration board. Believe us, this can breathe new life into your project and set the tone for everything that follows.

Now that you’ve got the basics of mood boards down, you’re ready to start creating your own. And if you’re looking for a partner to help bring your ideas to life, our UI/UX design services are here to support you every step of the way. With our industry knowledge, user-focused approach, and top-notch QA and support, we’ll make sure your design journey is smooth and enjoyable.