As you walk down the venture path you'll likely come across ideas and inspiration for the look and feel of your product, brand or experience. A Mood Board is a good way to organize those bits and pieces visually, in a way that can help your team stay true to your vision when it comes to design and branding. Similar to a collage, a mood board is a collection of images, words and patterns that are all related to the same theme. Mood Boards can also be used to validate those feelings and ideas with users. To do this, create a few Mood Boards that represent different perspectives on a theme you are investigating. Bring those out to a public place and see which visuals resonate with your test subjects. When you have settled on the most appropriate theme post your Mood Board in a shared space to inspire and guide your team as you work together to build your venture.
Teams can have multiple mood boards, for example, one could begin earlier in the Solution Validation phase when the team is looking to collect inspiration for features, another could be a visual representation of the main user persona or a team could have a single board that is focused on the branding and design elements of the venture and its products.
Building something new often means cobbling together ideas, designs and inspiration from other products, experiences and services. Mood boards capture this in a single place and help create an overarching representation of the feeling of the venture.
Though Mood Boards are traditionally paper objects that live on corkboards or as posters on your office wall, there are a number of great online tools to create mood boards too. Just be sure to share the boards with your team and give them a central place in your design process so they serve their purpose well. Some online tools include: Pinterest, Adobe Spark, The Mat Board, Canva or Mural.