Mood-Boarding Session

In this week's lecture we looked into the use of mood-boards as a way of presenting ideas and gathering inspiration for a project. We began the session with an exercise in quickly producing mood-boards to convey our perceptions of two scenarios - the first was about a news-caster who finishes work, drives home in his sports car and has a candle lit meal with his wife in their fancy house:

The second was about Queen Elizabeth I sentencing a pair of criminals to be beheaded after acts of treason:

Following this exercise we received a talk from a Emma Landolt, a senior creative at Drive Productions. Emma discussed with us the importance of mood-boards and how they can benefit the creative process in ways such as helping you 'get everything out of your head' or to quickly and easily assess what a client likes and what they don't like (this point struck me as being particularly important).

We were told that Emma begins her mood-boards by simply browsing image sharing websites such as Getty or Pinterest, saving relevant images into a series of folders sorted by what the images represent before going into each folder and only keeping the best images until there are just 10 or so images left per mood-board. This selective process helps narrow down what you really want out of your project. The mood-boards I created above were produced using images from
Examples of Emma's mood-boards along with information about last year's R&D talk can be found here.

Below are examples of mood-boards I found online that I find inspiring:

Images flow together really well through use of a limited colour palette. Overlapping images give a close and cozy feel very homely, the colours convey a calm mood which adds to this.

I like the layout here. Again the palette is limited which helps the images connect, yet they all seem more separate as they don't overlap; could be good for themes such as isolation or to imply distance between things; this compliments the imagery used here.