Create your wedding moodboard in 4 quick and easy steps!
This article aims to help you in the design and use of a moodboard for your wedding inspiration but also to help you understand how it can be useful, if you have a slightly artistic project!
Le moodboard: définition
A moodboard is a very personal tool, it allows you to give free rein to your imagination, your ideas and your emotions! The moodboard is also sometimes called inspiration board. It is a visual tool composed mostly of photos, images, texts and sometimes objects.
The moodboard allows you to project yourself, to anticipate a project (photos of a wedding, an apartment decoration, a design). Making a moodboard is giving a real artistic direction to your project, so that all parts of the project are harmonious.
Once its operation is well mastered, the moodboard will save you time in the design of your graphic projects or your events. We explain to you later in this article how to make yours in an organized way!
Why are we talking about it so much?
From wedding planners to graphic designers, from photographers to decorators, many people use a moodboard very regularly for their projects! Why ?
First of all, the moodboard makes it possible to set a guideline for all providers / employees around your wedding. Before starting anything, it sets the tone, the idea of what needs to be done.
The moodboard is also a tool that will help you focus on the visual aspect of your project: which texture for which color, with which material … It allows you to restrict yourself to the choices that will go best together one your wedding day, to choose from several possible choices.
Then, the moodboard is a creation aid: you have dozens of ideas and don’t know what to start with? This tool is a significant decision-making aid that will guide you in your creative choices. Example: you are getting married soon, make a moodboard and include all the essential ideas to make your wedding look like the one of your dreams!
Finally, it is a very good communication tool! If for example I want to talk to someone about a country wedding theme, for me that means guests sitting on bales of hay, arrival of the bride and groom on horseback and a barn as a reception venue, while for someone else it will simply be a very flowery decoration in the middle of the wooded park of a castle. This is why the use of a moodboard is interesting: it makes it possible to coordinate and guide all providers and employees around the same vision. For example, for a wedding, it will allow the florist to make creations adapted to those of the decorator for a prettier overall harmony, or for a website it will allow all the graphic designers to work with the same objective, one head, that meets your needs.
What does a moodboard look like ?
Here is an example of a moodboard used in the field of interior design.
What I like: the chosen color palette, the textures, the idea of incorporating images into white circles to break up the rectangles.
Here is an example of a moodboard used in the graphics.
What I like: the colors, the examples of drop caps.
Here is an example of a moodboard in the wedding field.
What I like: the text and its font, the color palette represented on each of the images.
How to do one ?
Whether you need to make a moodboard to harmonize an apartment decoration, think about what you would like for your wedding, or to decide on the design of a website, the steps are similar.
First, you will need to define a general theme that speaks to you and that you would like, in order to guide your initial research. You don’t necessarily have to be 100% sure of what your theme will be at the end, the moodboard is there for that, but you must have a very global vision of the look you want to give. The theme chosen at this stage will surely evolve, and so much the better, it will mean that you better define your desires.
Ideas of themes in the field of decoration:
- Japanese
- Flowery
- Halloween
- …
Ideas for themes in the field of the web:
- minimalist
- blue
- realistic
- …
Ideas of themes in the field of marriage:
- rural
- autumnal
- geek
- …
1-Brainstorming
Once the general theme has been defined, it’s time to do some research to gather as many elements as possible that you like! This is a phase where you need to accumulate resources that can be useful to you for ypour wedding day. These are not necessarily things closely linked with your theme, it can be photos that evoke an emotion, an impression … It can also be objects: in this case, take the pictures if they are large objects!
Some ideas of places to look for inspiration:
- On pinterest and google image: a keyword search will work wonders!
- Magazines, prospectuses
- The latest creative trends
- Nature
- Movies and series
- …
A great idea for a place to put your ideas: miro! On this platform with a free part sufficient for a moodboard, you just have to drag your images from any website to your board, the photographer’s website, the planner’s…. This platform keeps the original link of the image in case you want to find it later!
During this step or the next, you can choose a palette of colors that go well together, to add to your moodboard. To see if colors go well together, nothing could be simpler: take inspiration from pre-existing palettes, or test!
The wonderful Adobe Color tool will allow you to explore color palettes offered by the website by color, theme, keywords, and will also allow you to very precisely create your own color palette with aids for your creation: complementary colors , triads … This tool also allows you to extract the color palette of an image that you like!
2-Organization and selection
Then comes the selection or sorting phase: during this phase, it will be a question of selecting the elements that you like the most, which go best together, which are the most harmonious and the most coherent. To do this, start by analyzing the images collected and group them by common theme. Then delete the less representative elements, which you do not like or which do not go with the rest. During this phase, the most important thing is to think about the harmony of your moodboard: it must be pleasant to look at, just like your final project, whether it is the design of a website or the decoration of a wedding! To test it before layout, feel free to use the pinterest tables.
If you used miro in the previous phase, now continue by classifying the different images according to the themes by “geographical” area on your table!
Your moodboard is almost ready to be laid out: add, if you wish, words that willclarify further the service providers who will revolve around your project, your client, your collaborators. It can be titles, explanations, inspirational sentences, quotes, pieces of poems … Remember to put it in fonts that you like and that are coherent with the whole.
3-your wedding moodboard layout
Now it’s time to create your final moodboard, with the most representative images of each theme sorted.
I recommend limiting yourself to ten photos in order to see at one glance the style you want for the design of the project, but there are also moodboards with around thirty images, it’s up to you to see what suits you best !
Do not forget your text if you have chosen some as well as your color palette. The most important of this step: the care! The more careful you are with the layout, the more pleasant it will be to look at, and the more understandable it will be by the people to whom you show it.
If you used miro, just create a new board and drag the selected images over it, crop them and layout them as you want.
Otherwise, you can also use tools like Power Point or Canva, also very ergonomic but in my opinion less easy to learn if it’s your first time!
You can of course make your moodboard physically with images cut from magazines, printed, pieces of fabric, flowers … In this case, plan a good stock of repositionable paste, adhesive, pins, scissors, a large board or even a wall to hang all your ideas!
4-Finalization
Is your moodboard finished, saved and printed? Well done !
So all you have to do is use it. Very important: send it to all the collaborators revolving around the project! For example, you want to organize a wedding shoot in your image and you have created a moodboard with pretty photos illustrating the style you want. You don’t send it to the florist, you don’t send it to your makeup artist: disaster on your wedding day!
To conclude, I hope I have given you the opportunity to use this wonderful tool for your creative projects. If you use it, do not hesitate to give me a feedback with a photo of your moodboard, I will integrate it with pleasure in this article!
