Pinterest: How To Create A Mood Board For Your Branding
People often ask me how we get started when designing a client’s logo and that process has evolved quite a bit over the years. First, we spend time getting to know our clients through Brand Camp, which gives us a strong understanding of their business and branding direction.
Beyond that, we need to have visual inspiration and a sense of the client’s style as well as likes and dislikes when it comes to design. This helps streamline the process, saving everyone time and money. So we’ve taken to Pinterest for this process and it has worked beautifully!
It helps to ask yourself these questions:
What inspires you visually?
What do you imagine your brand design looks like?
Below is our step-by-step guide for creating a Pinterest board that will be extremely beneficial in the design process. It helps clarify the design direction and can inform the look and feel of all your branding, including your logo, website, business cards, social media and so on.
How to create an inspiration board:
If you don’t have a Pinterest account yet, you’ll need to sign up for one.
Create a board on Pinterest and pin images that reflect your brand. (You can make this board private if you don’t want people to see it. You will be able to invite your designer to share the board so they can see your inspiration.)
Search for words/feelings related to your business and pin them to your board. (ie. If you are starting a yoga studio, search for yoga, yoga studio, zen, peace, strength, and so on…)
Search for other things like colours, font styles, patterns, imagery, photos, etc.
Pin the images that reflect your business’ personality.
Once you’ve got a good amount of images (25-50) - look for and note any trends or similarities among the images. (ie. colours, emotion, style, aesthetic – modern/traditional)
This will give you and your designer great insight into the style you want and helps inform the design direction.
The key is not always what’s in the image, but how it makes you feel. Does it make you feel what you want your clients to feel when they see your brand? If yes, then pin it!
Here are a few things to consider:
You can pin logos, but this shouldn’t be a main focus. Utilize the pin descriptions and say why you chose that image.
Take a peek at the related pins section – it shows related pins and could be useful.
Only pin things that feel right. This is very much “feelings” process and it’s important to listen to what your gut is telling you.
Before you can get to this point with your branding, you need to understand what makes you different and the benefits you offer (among many other things). To do this we created Brand Camp. So if you’re ready to start your business or take it to the next level…If you feel like your business vision doesn’t align with your brand…
If the clients you are attracting don’t bring you closer to your goals…Brand Camp is for you.
Click here to learn more about our next start date.