Mood Boards for Brand Identity Design

Design studio The Negra teaches you how to conceptualize a visual universe

Mood boards are among the best starting points that any creative can use before embarking on a new project. In identity and brand design, they l help you share your vision with your client and make sure that they agree on the general path the design will take.

For creative studio The Negra (@thenegra), the mood board is a way of understanding the graphic universe in which a brand develops. Learn their method of searching for visual references, building boards, and visualizing a concept.

What is the role of the mood board?

In your mood board, you will order and edit a series of images that convey the project's ideas and conceptual essence.

Although the concepts are abstract, your job will be to translate it into visual content that expresses your vision.The first thing you should do is look for a series of references, remembering that none of these images really tells the whole story. That is why you will need to sort this information in order to build a narrative.

By editing the order of the reference images, they will begin to tell something less abstract and easier to relate to.

How to start

You can create folders from words or concepts that are fundamental to the brand. In this example, The Negra used the words ‘flashy, impulsive, informal, and irreverent’.

Once you have the concepts, look for images related to each of those, from typefaces, color palettes, photos, illustrations, drawings, shapes, etc. In this example, based on the "flashy" concept, they searched for images that referred to something exaggerated and demanding attention.

Build your mood board

Find the relationship between the images to establish visual connections. From this point on, you will begin to make design decisions that will help you later in the identity design process.

You can keep your images in folders on your computer, on social media, like Pinterest, and then present them in an edited final image.

Show your mood board

When talking to your client or your team, the mood board will help you explain the images, and the relationships between them: what they have in common, how they reinforce ideas, and what elements you will apply in your design.

As for the technical aspect, The Negra recommends that you create templates that work in an orderly way and that the presentation is attractive. Show your mood board as PDF, with at least one page for each keyword.

If you want to learn more about how to design a high-impact brand identity, sign up for The Negra's Brand Identity Design course.

You may also like:

- How Social Changes Influence Spaces
- How to Present a Logo to a Client
- 3 Iconic Logo Redesigns