The Art of Visual Communication: 12 Tips for Creating Powerful Mood Boards

Design projects rely heavily on visual tools that illustrate the project's features and overall atmosphere, and whether you are an architect, interior designer, furniture designer, or engineer, the term 'mood board' has definitely come up at some point during the early stages of the design process. Generally speaking, images have immense powers of influencing and inspiring their viewers, so putting together a powerful mood board can be a game changer for the architect, the visual artist, and the clients, and can amplify the project's story telling process. So what is a mood board and how can you create one?

+ 10

By definition, a mood board is an assemblage of colors, textures, prints, materials, or other design elements that make up a project's identity. These elements are often gathered during the design process and ideation stage, and serve as inspiration for what the project will look like. However, architects have found that mood boards tend to be very helpful during the visualization and rendering phase as well, since they can give the 3D artist a glimpse of how users will feel inside the project, and so, facilitating the rendering process. Although mood boards are commonly used in interior design practices, but they have become powerful visual communication tools in architecture, fashion design, product design, and industrial design as well.

How to Create a Mood Board?

This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: Rendering, proudly presented by Enscape, the most intuitive real-time rendering and virtual reality plugin for Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, Archicad, and Vectorworks. Enscape plugs directly into your modeling software, giving you an integrated visualization and design workflow.’ Learn more about our monthly topics. As always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.