This summer I've been teaching UX to high schoolers through Digital Media Academy at Stanford and I have been blown away by their work. These are a few mood boards that my students designed that I thought really captured the essence of the sites they were creating.
This one is for an online art sharing / buying / selling site:
This was for a sports team website:
I started the assignment off by first having my students write down 5-10 keywords that they want the user to think of when they see the site.
These words should then be considered when selecting all of the visual elements. Does this font convey those keywords? Does this color convey excitement?
Each group member designed their own moodboard and then they came together and shared their concepts. They negotiated which elements worked best and then designed a moodboard and style guide as a group. Once the designers were on the same page, they were able to pass these on to the developer class so they could code out the CSS.