Being inspired is one of the best feelings in the world, and mood boards help achieve that feeling. Mood boards are visual spreads that represent a specific feeling or an end goal. People make mood boards for interior design, wedding planning, outfit inspiration and even to help them set goals for a new year.
Personal mood boards are a type of board that collects different forms of content to build a visual representation of one’s own inspiration. Creating a mood board for yourself is not only enjoyable but can inspire new ideas visually.
Pick a medium for your board
This is the first step in making your mood board, and there are a lot of options when initially choosing a medium. For a digital mood board, there are countless apps and websites that can help with your process. I use Pinterest for my mood boards because I can find, save, and organize all the photos that inspire me in one place. A website like Canva is another option that can help create photo spreads, but it has less of the photo-sharing space that Pinterest provides.
A physical mood board is a good idea if you’re looking to take inspiration from magazines, books or other printed sources. I’ve used old sketch books, cardboard and other mediums for these types of mood boards, and they work well if you’re wanting to put your mood board on display.
Start collecting inspiration
Go through magazines, websites, Pinterest, Instagram feeds and every other place you find inspiring content. This content can be poems that make you think, outfits that you would wear or photos that move you in any way. You don’t have to be organized during this process because the intent of this step is to figure out the things that spark interest.
Save the content in one place, whether that be in a file on your desktop or somewhere else for safekeeping.
Organize your saved content
This is where you can get a bit more technical with the content that you’ve saved. Start looking for patterns in the type of things that you feel inspired by and put similar items together to make categories for your mood board.
For example, if you save multiple photos of outfits you like for your mood board, clump them together to get a bigger picture of what your vision for fashion looks like. This can help you to understand what inspires you regarding certain categories on your mood board.
Make your mood board
Making a mood board is great for anyone because you can use whatever organization style works best. If having a simple folder of inspiration photos works best, this can be your final product. If making a collage for the wallpaper on your phone is easier, that works as well.
My personal preference is using my photos saved from Pinterest to create digital collages for my desktop wallpaper on my computer. This method works best for me because opening my laptop each day means that I see my mood board frequently. Whatever method provides the most assessable way to see the things that inspire you is the correct way to make a mood board.
That’s the beauty of curating your own mood board — you can’t mess it up.
