Currently I am working towards a certificate in Visual Design at General Assembly and today we worked on Moodboards.

The prompt was to create a design brief for kickstarter's highest grossing campaign, Coolest Cooler, a versitile cooler that has a ton of amenities in a single product.

We were then challenged to design a moodboard for Coolest Cooler branding that also encapsulated the following qualities: handmade, unique, and unexpected. This campaign is also geared towards women 25-35 years old.

The purpose of moodboards are:

• Opportunity to Experiment

• Help people communicate creative ideas

• Convey branding, tone, impression, look & feel

Moodboards are good for business because they are a fast, and therefore cheap, way to produce ideas. Designing a comp takes several hours and may not even accurately convey the emotional feel of the product.

You can make several moodboards in the time that it takes to design a comp and you should to show an array of strategies. It is suggested to make four:

1. One that is our initial gut reaction.

2. One that is a more conservative version of the initial board.

3. One that is more extreme.

4. One completely ‘out there’ approach that is probably inappropriate.

If you don't use moodboards the following problems may arise:

• Clients focused on personal preference of visual design rather than the appropriate tone that speaks to user needs.

• Clients often referred to sites that were either inappropriate for their audience or were selected based on content rather than design.

• Producing multiple design concepts was time consuming for the designer and expensive for the client. A lower fidelity product ensures that stakeholders and designers don't get too attached.

• Frankenstein design: client would try to combine the ‘best bits’ from each comp. The designs went through a lot of iterations because the designer did not have a full understanding of the clients requirements.

The next step after creating a moodboard is to make a StyleTile:

Learn more about StyleTiles: http://styletil.es/

#moodboard #visualdesign