A problem I have encountered in the past is a client sometimes can’t look beyond small details within a design and will inadvertently try to alter everything else within the design when trying to find the solution.  It’s similar to chucking out the baby with the bath water! In other words getting rid of the good part as well as the discarded dirty water.

Seperate aesthetics from content
In response to this I have started to use mood boards in conjunction with wireframes in order to separate content from aesthetics in a similar way to how CSS is used with HTML in website design. By separating aesthetics from content it makes it easier for the client to focus on each division rather than letting one distract the other.

The whole idea of mood boards is again to make sure we get the design right at the first time without having to make lots of variations and iterations. The problem with variations is that often Frankenstein design happens with the client taking bits from one mock-up and attaching it to another one.

What exactly is a mood board then?
A mood board is a collection of graphical elements that establish a set on styles and tones which create a potential look and feel for your site. Your mouldboard should be made up on lots of snippets which you can find from the web or magazines or anywhere else you wish to look for that matter. Mood boards should experiment with the following areas:

• Typography
• Colour
• Imagery
• Layout
• Style

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t believe we should ask clients which sites they like and it should be up to the designer to make stylistic suggestions and give their informed opinion of a direction they think the website should go in.

When creating your mood board make sure you don’t use a standard web canvas as this will subconsciously make you design as if you were designing a website…your canvas can be any size…experiment. Not designing a website is very hard to do though…as you will see with my first attempt. Curiosity overcame me and I was eager to learn how the final design would look. The important thing is not to make the design to be too finished or polished …all you are doing is establishing styles. When putting these together don’t even try to design you should be quick and spontaneous when putting these together…and only evolve the elements you think could work at a later stage. I would set a max time of 1 hour to create a mood board. The idea of creating a mood board is to ultimately save time.

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