A well-crafted brand mood board is an invaluable tool for creative entrepreneurs in the beginning phrases of branding or rebranding their business. It guides the development of your brand’s identity and ensures consistency across all channels. Whether you’re starting a new business or rebranding an existing one, creating a mood board helps conceptualize your vision and define your brand’s vibe. 

As a branding expert and web designer, I work with all kinds of business owners in the creative space. I always start with a brand mood board to bring my client’s ideas to life. It sets the stage for the rest of the creative process involved in developing a brand. So I want to share a little behind-the-scenes look at how I create a Pinterest mood board for creative entrepreneurs.

What is a Brand Mood Board?

A brand mood board is a visual way to capture the overall style, feeling, and aesthetic of a brand. It’s a collage of images, colors, textures, and typography representing a brand’s identity. 

A brand’s identity consists of:

• Personality
• Emotions
• Tone
• Audience
• Values

It helps business owners communicate the look and feel of their brand before developing actual branding elements, like logos, a website, and a color palette.

A brand mood board is the first step in creating a professional brand. It’s a mistake to skip this step in the creative process!

Why Entrepreneurs Need a Brand Mood Board

A mood board helps streamline the creative process, whether you’re DIY’ing, or you hired a branding expert or a web designer to spearhead the project. By thinking through your branding before creating, you build a cohesive and strategic brand. Here are some other reasons you need a brand mood board!

• Clarifies Your Brand Vision: Helps you understand the impact you want your brand to convey. What type of feeling do you want to evoke in your potential client or customer? How will their life be improved or transformed by what you offer?
• Ensures Consistency: Provides a reference point to ensure content aligns with your brand’s identity.
• Saves Time: Speeds up design decisions. The brand mood board will inform your logos, font suite, color palette and brand imagery.
• Connect With Your Audience: Resonates with your ideal client and ensures your brand speaks to the right people.
• Inspires Content Creation: Offers continuous inspiration from a visual perspective. Your moodboard is the “vibe” from which all your content should flow!

Creating a Pinterest Mood Board

I use Pinterest to build mood boards for branding clients. Consumers use Pinterest for ideation, so why not business owners?! Here’s how to create a mood board on Pinterest.

Start a Dedicated Board on Pinterest

The first step is to create a specific Pinterest mood board. This keeps everything in one place and you can easily update it as you solidify your brand. I love using Pinterest because it’s a visual platform. Clients can visualize their brand’s aesthetic from color schemes, photography, and typography I’ve saved for them.

Define Your Brand Identity

Next, identify the core elements of your brand: values, mission, and target audience. This isn’t a step to rush through while developing your brand. Your brand values create a foundation and impact your entire company. 

Your brand identity will influence the mood and tone of your Pinterest mood board. Aligning brand values and visuals creates an authentic brand identity, which builds trust with your target audience. During this step, start to remove visual elements from your Pinterest mood board that don’t align with your brand identity.

Find Inspiration

This is the fun part! It’s time to gather visual elements that reflect the look and feel of your brand. Search for keywords related to your brand’s personality. Here are some examples:

• Bohemian
• Sophisticated
• Elegant
• Approachable
• Innovative
• Creative
• Outdoorsy
• Empowering

Search literally anything you can think of that you want your brand to convey to your audience! Save photos, fonts, and colors that resonate with your brand vision. Be creative and pin as much as you want! Over time, trends will start to emerge that will guide the creative direction of your business. 

Organize Your Pinterest Mood Board

Now that you have a solid brand mood board on Pinterest, let’s organize it and start pulling specific elements to use for your brand. From the Pinterest images, I pull the pins that best represent the vibe and aesthetics my client is going for. 

I use colors from the images and use the tool Coolors to develop color palettes for clients. I take a few key colors from the Pinterest mood board and plug them into Coolors one at a time. Then, the tool generates four other colors that work well with the original color. I can compare the generated color palettes to the rest of the Pinterest mood board to see what other elements align with the brand’s identity.

Turn Your Brand Mood Board into a Reality

Once you have a solid mood board and brand identity, you can start to turn it into a reality. I recommend creating a brand guide that outlines how to use your brand’s elements to ensure consistency across all touchpoints with your audience. 

You can use your brand guide to create and gather:

• Logos
• Color palette
• Font suite
• Brand patterns
• Website elements
• Social media templates
• Stock photos

By focusing on consistency and aligning with your brand values, you can create a visual identity that resonates with your target audience and builds a recognizable brand presence.

Creating a Pinterest Mood Board with Vineyard Creative Co.

Creating a brand mood board is more than just a creative exercise; it’s a strategic step in building a strong and cohesive brand identity. Carefully selecting visual elements that align with your brand’s values lays the foundation for an impactful brand presence. 

I’m currently booking branding and web design clients! If you’re ready to have a cohesive brand that aligns with your values and resonates with your target audience, reach out to me! I’d love to discuss the vision for your brand and start creating a brand mood board for you 🙂

*This blog post may contain affiliate links. I never recommend anything I don’t personally love and use myself for my clients or in my own business!