In praise of cutting out and sticking down. Or, the enduring appeal of the mood board.
It could easily have gone pear-shaped but I did it all the same.
I asked a perfectly sensible bunch of grown-up clients to pick up a pair of brightly coloured IKEA scissors and dealt out a selection of magazines, ranging from Woman’s Weekly to Monocle.
Within minutes, their embarrassment turned to unbridled enjoyment, as they got stuck into the cutting out.
Making a mood board suddenly didn’t seem like such a childish suggestion after all.
I have always loved mood boards and they remain one of my favourite show-and-tell tools.
I use them both to explain an approach to a client and I get clients to make them in front of me.
It’s a really effective way of discussing something fluffy or abstract and making it tangible enough to be understood.
In the past, I’ve done a board demonstrating the meaning of ‘mischievous charm’ for a leading brand of pantie liners. (It’s a long story.)
I’ve done a board explaining the meaning of the expression ‘national treasure’ for the UK’s rail infrastructure body.
I’ve helped the Kenyan Olympic Team explain the meaning of an African word to Brits, when there was no direct translation, armed with only what I could buy from the local newsagent.
It’s not so much the pictures and words, in themselves, that I’m interested in so much as the explanation for the choice.
With permission, I record the explanation of a mood board as a voice file, so that I can be reminded of the nuance and emphasis the story teller gave to their words.
This is the gold I’m panning for.
Typically, mood boards look a bit of a mess. Pictures (and words) are arranged on the board in a haphazard way, which is fine because that’s probably how we arrange our thoughts.
A lot of this accidental appeal disappears when a board is made digitally because you have a bit more control — and your choice of imagery is limitless.
This doesn’t sound like a disadvantage but, like a Mac visual, a digital mood board looks ‘finished’, rather than a work in progress.
This means that the outcome is viewed and scrutinised in a more critical way because the viewer knows that you could choose any imagery you liked from the world of the internet.
Having said this, if you’re making a board from the comfort of your own laptop, digital can still work a treat and is in many ways more convenient.
From a pretty unimpressive start, niice.co have developed a pretty compelling tool that moves the mood board into different territory — making it a collaborative tool that’s used as part of a ‘creative conversation’.
Simpler, for me, is Apple’s Keynote, which I use when I don’t have access to the mags and need to make a PDF.
But I still don’t think you can beat a big sheet of black cardboard.
Before embarking on any exercise that will eventually lead to some form of creative execution or the explanation of a hard-to-grasp concept, I strongly recommend you reach for the scissors.
