When it comes to interior design, I don’t know one person that doesn’t love the dream and design phase of creating a new space or tackling a big remodel. To do this many people will make a mood board to get the project started. Picking out light fixtures, furniture, textures, paint colors, & more to put together and get the vibe of the space. How to Make a Mood Board is part three of our new series Blogging Basics, but this post will apply to anyone interested in design and mood boards. If you haven’t checked out our first two parts of our series click here for Blogging Basics 1 and here for Blogging Basics 2, where we share tips and tricks to blogging for those considering starting a blog, or new bloggers looking to stand out. So let’s talk about mood boards.
What and why use a mood boards?
Mood boards are created in a variety of different ways today. Their purpose is to showcase the overall design you are seeking through literal or inspired elements you showcase within the board. My first mood boards were done with poster board, glue sticks , and cut outs from magazines or catalogs. The goals was to show case furniture, rugs, window treatments, patterns, and natural or cultural elements driving the design. I would also include actual fabric materials from items like drapery, seating fabrics, rugs, and any other textures that pertained to the design. I would include paint chips for the space, and if possible any other element to bring the vision to life. I touched about mood boards in my book, Cozy White Cottage, but I truly believe that a well thought out design that is brought to life through visualization of a mood board creates a strong blue print for a space to help capture the finer details and really make a design really stand out.
How I use them today?
While nothing will ever replace my real life, poster board style mood board with real elements on it, digital mood boards are my go to right now in design. As an interior design and home decor blogger, I love creating new design on my house to not only feed my addiction for design, but hopefully inspire a look or element of my design in others spaces in their home. When new furniture lines come out, or a get a common questions regarding design, I like to lean on a mood board to show how to tackle those design challenges, or if your considering investing an entirely new furniture layout how to pair things together. A lot of what we do here on the blog is to inspire design. We try to teach ways to get your spaces the perfect level of cozy for you and your family. Today I put together a mood board for you guys for a home office using all things from Arhaus to demonstrate my mood board tutorial.
How to make a mood board
Digital mood boards in the day were mostly created through somewhat complicated software like photoshop. Photoshop has a significant learning curve, but once you figure it out its power is remarkable. For me, creating mood boards is so fun, I want an easy and simple way I can put these together without the unnecessary power and complicated steps and that is why I use Canva. I have been using Canva for a few years now, and recently they added some elements that brought it up to the ability of photoshop without the massive learning curve. They added a quick button to remove the backgrounds. I always hated when I couldn’t find a product with a white background, it would really through my board off a little. Now just a quick click of button, no tracing required, you can single out items quickly creating the perfect cut out for your board.
So here is how I make my mood boards:
- Go around the internet and select and save items you want to include in your mood board. If possible, select images that have white backgrounds. If not, no worries there is an easy way to get rid of those.
- Go to Canva.com
- Select create a design (as you build designs you can save them as templates. This speeds up the process when selecting fonts, or other design elements you’ll use across all design boards).
- Select your dimensions. I typically use rectangle mood boards with dimensions 800 x 1200.
- Now upload your saved images from step one.
- Start dragging your images to the white canvas.
- If you are using an image with a background that you want to remove. With the image selected, select effects, and then select remove background. This isn’t always perfect, but dow a really good job most of the time.
- Locate the position button in the top right corner. This will move items back and forward (in front of other objects).
Pro Tip: If you are going back and forth between some design elements, once you build one mood board, select copy (right above the canvas) to duplicate the canvas. Now you can change those few elements for a space.
- Add text to specify color names and numbers, furniture brands and models, or any areas that aren’t easily identified as an image.
Canva does have a free version and a paid subscription, I use the paid subscription. I have had the paid version for a long time now, so I don’t quite remember all the difference between paid and free, but all of the items covered in this post can be done in the free version. With the paid version, you open up more graphic elements, text fonts, overall storage and a few other things.
You can shop the items in this post below:
I hope this post shows how easy and simple it can be to create a mood board for your next design or refresh. Canva does a really good job and making the process doable for anyone, with minimal learning curve. If you are considering becoming a blogger and especially a home decor and design blogger, please check out our first to blogging basics listed above, we love helping and talking about blogging so feel free to reach out on our socials or email. As always thank you so much for stopping by the blog, it means the world to us here on the farm.
