Against the mood board

Everyone in the room likes the mood board. That is the problem with it.

A grid of twenty beautiful images lets each person project a different project onto the same surface. The founder is looking at the photography. The marketing lead is looking at the type. You are looking at the spacing. Everybody nods, and everybody leaves with a different brief.

Agreement without commitment

The mood board asks for a reaction, not a decision. Nobody can be wrong about liking an image. So it produces the easiest kind of consensus — the kind that evaporates the moment real work is put in front of it, because now there is something specific to disagree with.

If the approval was free, it was not an approval.

What I do instead

Three or four sentences, written, describing what the thing should feel like and — more usefully — what it should never do. Then one real artefact: an actual page, at actual size, with actual copy.

Sentences are harder to nod along to. It should feel closer to a public library than a boutique is a claim somebody can argue with, and if they do, that argument was going to happen anyway. Better now, on a sentence, than in six weeks on a layout.

The exception

Mood boards are genuinely useful in one direction: as a record of what has been rejected. A wall of things we agreed we are not doing, with a line about why, is worth keeping. It is the only version I still make.