Singapore interior design professionals communicate ideas and concepts with their clients in more than one way. While digital technologies have contributed to some pretty impressive and innovative presentations, one traditional approach when brainstorming for a new home interior design to share is still around. This approach consists of the good, old mood board.
A mood board is a kind of visual presentation that features samples of objects, colours or textures. It can be executed on numerous different topics, including home décor.
If you’re racking your brain for an example of a mood board, you can often see such presentations in interior design, beauty and fashion magazines.
Planning a home renovation project while we are still in phase 1 of the circuit breaker on your own can benefit from the creation of a mood board. It will give you the visual and the focal point needed to anchor your ideas and put together a consistent, cohesive presentation.
So, what does it take to put together a mood board that’s reminiscent of what a professional would accomplish? Here are some of the most important rules and tips to follow.
Choose a Style or a Theme
The primary purpose of the mood board is to give you a visual representation of different items, textures and colours working together.
In the world of interior design, choices, styles and themes are abound.
Unless you pick one theme that you’re going to base your mood board on, you’ll end up with a hodgepodge that’s heavily disjointed.
So choose an interior design style or a theme (for example – a nautical theme) that the elements featured on the mood board will all belong to. When you have such a starting point, you can explore multiple possibilities that can be harmonious with each other.
Formatting and the Arrangement of Visuals Matter
To make your interior design mood board look professional, you’ll need to follow a couple of simple formatting and arrangement rules.
For a start, if you’re going to feature a lot of colour, select a white background. It will help the different pieces pop.
Putting together a colour chart is also a good idea before you even get started. Feature the main and the complementary colours in small rectangles on the side of the mood board.
Next comes product grouping.
Try to group larger items like sofas, chairs and tables together. Select images that are front-facing and that reveal as much of the respective item as possible.
For smaller items, increase their size to maximise visibility. The visual representations on a mood board do not need to be to scale. If a smaller item features lots of ornaments that will be lost if you keep it tiny, increase the size of that visual alone in comparison to everything else featured on the mood board.
If your finalised board looks unbalanced (for example, having more images on one side than on the other), try to rearrange the pieces creatively or add a few more items to the mix.
The types of visuals and the quality of the images are both very important.
You need to do your research if you want a professional quality, highly useful mood board.
That process should start long before you start putting the mood board together.
Browse through Pinterest and Instagram and save all of the images that you like and may eventually use later on. You can have several different folders that you add options to – furniture, textiles, decorations, art, etc.
The websites of producers can also give you access to product catalogues and high-quality images. Do explore many different visuals. Check out the angles and the information each picture provides. It’s best to stick to photos that feature a white background and the item of interest alone rather than in combination with other pieces.
Go Old-School and Create a Physical Mood Board!
If you’re not that good when it comes to using image processing software, you can go really old school with the creation of your mood board.
Some white cardboard, interior design magazines, glue and scissors will give you all of the essential elements.
When putting together a physical mood board, the quality of the visuals you choose is even more important because you cannot do image adjustment and editing. You cannot change the scale, the size and the colour balance. Hence, you should go through enough magazines to discover the exact images representative of your vision.
An old-school physical mood board can feature additional materials like colour samples, fabric swatches, paint chips and tile samples. As a result, you can benefit from a much more thorough and realistic representation of the interior design change you want to introduce in your home.
Once you have all of these pieces together, you can play with the arrangement of your board. Don’t hurry to attach anything permanently before you experiment with a couple of different layouts.
A good mood board features only items you love and giving your interior designer such a presentation can really help for the realisation of your vision. So don’t hurry, enjoy the research and have fun while putting a mood board together.
If you need some assistance or you already have a mood board that you’d like to share with a professional, don’t hesitate to contact us. If not, check out our portfolio for some inspiration. We’re looking forward to learning more about your idea and executing it in your home, your office or your retail space.
